by Sergey Lepilov
11/20/2006 | 06:10 PM
Our today’s article is devoted to Asetek cooling solution that boasts unusually thick heatpipes that make 13mm in diameter. According to the manufacturer, heatpipes with such big diameter boast bigger area for more effective heat dissipation. Besides, the special contents of the liquid or gas inside these heatpipes contributes to the higher cooling efficiency. Moreover, the engineers paid special attention to the design of the cooler sole, in order to ensure maximum heat dissipation efficiency. Today’s article is going to reveal how successful these efforts turned out.
Let’s take a closer look at our today’s major testing participant – Asetek VapoChill Micro cooler.
In fact, we first came across this cooling solution about a year ago, which was reported I our news, however, we didn’t have a chance to get down to testing it yet. So today we are going to correct this mistake of ours and get you the most indepth review of this solution. As we have already mentioned, the major peculiarity of Asetek VapoChill Micro is the use of thick heatpipes aka thermal siphons.
Asetek VapoChill Micro product line includes three cooler models that differ by the design of the fan and package bundle. They are Extreme Performance, Hi-End and Ultra Low Noise. Moreover, the coolers are not universal and each of these models is designed for three different processor sockets (Socket 478, LGA775 and Socket 754/939/940). So, there are 9 modifications of Asetek VapoChill Micro cooling solution. However, if you upgraded to a new platform you don’t have to replace the entire cooler. You can simply purchase a corresponding retention kit for your particular socket type. According to the company’s official website, these kits are pretty pricy and sell for about the price of a budget cooler (19 Euro). There you can also see that Asetek VapoChill Micro is not designed to fit onto the Socket AM2 platform. The fan rotation speed regulator is not included with the Hi-End package, so you can always purchase it separately, if you need it.
The sample we got into our lab belonged to the Extreme Performance line and was originally designed for the LGA775 Socket.
Asetek VapoChill Micro is shipped in transparent plastic package that allows you to easily examine the cooler design before you purchase it:
The package claims that this cooler can dissipate up to 150W of heat, and the reverse side of the package is all devoted to the cooler technical specifications.
There is a thin carton semi-box at the bottom of the package that contains the following components:
So that we could also perform the cooler tests on an AMD platform, Asetek has also sent us a Socket 754/939/940 retention kit in an individual package:
Inside we found a small marketing booklet and the retention bracket, of course.
Asetek VapoChill Micro boasts pretty original looks. Round heatsink sole made of solid copper ends with a semi-sphere. There is a thick pipe coming out of this semi-sphere, which distributes the heat into three 13mm-thick heatpipes via the horizontal pipe connecting all of them:
The cooler sole is a hollow chamber that serves as evaporation zone with pipes coming out of it. This allows Asetek VapoChill Micro cooler to get rid of a few bottlenecks that most of regular heatpipe cooling solutions have. Just take a look at the scheme we borrowed from the Asetek website:
The semi-spherical chamber and heatpipes are filled with low-boiling gas that performs the heat transfer efficiently. As I have already mentioned earlier, these are not quite the heatpipes, but thermal siphons. They work just like heatpipes do, however the circulation of the gas inside the system is based on gravity, and not on the capillary forces.
The heatpipes go through 54 aluminum plates, which offer slightly bigger heat dissipation area thanks to their wavy shape.
There is a transparent plastic casing that fits on top of the heatsink. Then you can use the plastic clips included with the cooler to fasten the fan on top of this casing:
Note that this casing is not fastened to the heatsink in any way. So, the casing as well as the fan sitting on top of it are not locked steadily on the cooler. as a result, you can notice some unpleasant vibrations and sounds during work at high fan rotation speed.
Let’s check out the Extreme Performance fan now:
According to its technical specifications, its maximum rotation speed equals 3,800RPM with the 73.7CFM air flow and 39dBA noise level, which is pretty loud I should say.
Two other models come equipped with slower and hence quieter operating fans:
The cooler sole is a thick solid copper plate with the pre-applied thermal interface:
This punctuate-drop application of thermal paste ensures very even distribution of the thermal interface over the cooler sole during installation. We performed our efficiency express-test and found out that the Asetek thermal past is as efficient as the famous KPT-8. After that discovered that the cooler sole is almost not polished at all, you can feel the machine tracks on it, although I have to admit that it is very even.
We specifically titled this section “Correct Installation”. The thing is that the actual installation procedure is very simple: you take the proper retention bracket for your system and install the cooler following easy instructions in the guide that the package of the cooler transforms into when unfolded:
It is much more important however to turn the cooler so that it faces the right direction inside the case. The thing is that the thermal siphon of the Asetek VapoChill Micro cooler will work only if the ends of the heatpipes are facing upwards. Here are a few examples:
Incorrect installation | Correct installation |
We tested both cases. If the cooler is installed the way you see on the left-hand side, it doesn’t work at all and the system freezes on the boot-up stage. And if you turn it as we demonstrate on the right-hand side, the heatpipes work just fine and the cooler works great with overclocked CPUs. But we will discuss overclocking a little bit later, and now let’s take a look at the detailed cooler specifications:
Take a look at the table below:
I compared the Asetek VapoChill Micro cooler with a Thermaltake Big Typhoon cooler that was equipped with a standard 120mm fan rotating at ~1320rpm.
The following components were used in the testbeds:
Important: ASUS P5B Deluxe/WiFi-AP mainboard featured a new BIOS version 0614. In our previous cooler review we used the same mainboard for our tests, but the BIOS version was 0507. The new BIOS version features corrected CPU temperature monitoring (it is lowered), therefore it would be incorrect to compare our today’s results with what was obtained during our previous test sessions.
All tests were performed in Windows XP Professional Edition Service Pack 2. I installed Nvidia nForce version 6.82 and Intel Chipset Drivers version 8.1.1.1001 for the ABIT and ASUS mainboards, respectively. I also installed DirectX 9.0c (August 2006 release) and ForceWare 91.31 graphics card driver.
SpeedFan version 4.29 was used to monitor the temperatures and fan speeds on the AMD platform. The temperature of the Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 was monitored with S&M version 1.8.1 which was also used to heat up both CPUs by running the FPU test at 100% load for 15 minutes.
Besides the S&M tool we also tested our cooling systems in the “Game” mode. In this mode the computer was running 3DMark06’s Firefly Forest test 19 times in a row with 16x anisotropic filtering but without full-screen antialiasing.
The temperature was read from the integrated CPU sensor. The mainboards’ automatic fan speed management was disabled for the time of the tests. The thermal throttling of the Intel Core 2 Duo processor was controlled with RightMark CPU Clock Utility version 2.15. I additionally controlled the temperature of the Intel Core 2 Duo with Core Temp Beta 0.9.0.91 which would report a 1.5°C higher temperature of both cores than S&M did.
The coolers were tested on an open testbed and in a closed system case that was equipped with two 120mm system fans for intake and exhaust and one 120mm fan on the side panel next to the processor socket. Each cooler was tested in at least two test cycles. I waited for 25-30 minutes for the temperature inside the system case to stabilize during each test cycle. The temperature stabilization took twice as little on an open stand. The highest results from the two test cycles are shown in the diagrams (if the difference was not bigger than 1°C). Despite the stabilization period, the results of the second cycle would usually be 0.5-1°C higher.
The ambient temperature was monitored with an electric thermometer near the system case. During the tests on AMD platform it remained around 22.6-23°C, and during the tests on Intel platform – around 21.4-21.7°C.
I used the Athlon 64 3200+ processor (running at 2GHz default speed) with the removed heat-spreader that was overclocked to 2.7GHz with the Vcore set at 1.575V:
Here are the obtained results:
VapoChill Micro from Asetek it proved pretty efficient on the AMD platform even in the quiet operation mode, i.e. at ~1970 RPM fan rotation speed. Moreover, if we increase the fan rotation speed, it becomes even more efficient on the overclocked AMD platform, although in this case you have to sacrifice the audio comfort: the cooler get’s very loud.
The dual-core Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 processor with B2 core stepping and 1866MHz nominal speed was overclocked to 3400MHz (+82.2%) with Vcore set to 1.45V:
Here are the obtained results:
The situation is pretty similar to what we have already seen in the previous case. However as we can see, Asetek solution cannot boast extreme cooling efficiency sufficient for seriously overclocked Intel Core 2 Duo processor.
All in all, our today’s test results didn’t quite justify for the use of thick heatpipes and special gas mixtures alongside with peculiar cooler design. Actually, I have to admit that Asetek VapoChill Micro cooling solution offers pretty mediocre efficiency for the money you got to pay for it. Moreover, you will have to purchase a special retention for a new platform, because it is not bundled with the cooler.
So, let’s sum up:
Highs:
Lows:
