by Sergey Lepilov
06/29/2007 | 10:04 PM
This next round of our CPU cooler tests fell on a week of scorching hot weather when the thermometer reported 32°C and higher, when people would drink pails of water and other liquids per day, and when a slightest puff of the wind seemed like God’s grace. It’s hard to live in such weather but it is good for the hardware reviewer’ work: if a cooler passes tests successfully under such conditions, its stable operation at lower ambient temperatures is guaranteed. To make the testing even more rigorous, I installed an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor onto the testbed. This CPU is very hot even by today’s standards, having a TDP of 105W.
<%BANNER[article]%>For this test session I take four Spire coolers from different price categories and varying in design: DiamondCool, VertiCool IV, Fourier III, and Fourier IV. They are going to pass a trying ordeal considering the above-mentioned conditions, yet this only makes it the more interesting to me. Besides examining and testing the coolers, I will measure their noise. The measurement method will be explained in the last section of the review.
The junior model among the reviewed ones comes in a small cardboard box that shows the manufacturer’s name and has a sticker that indicates the product model. There is nothing else on the box:
Well, it is a low-end model and the manufacturer’s desire to save on everything is understandable. The box contains a brief installation manual and a plastic back-plate:
The Spire DiamondCool is small by today’s standards at 92x92x53cm.
It is small but surprisingly heavy for its size. The all-copper heatsink consists of 55 thin ribs that have contact with the copper base as well as with the copper pipes. The pipes are unusually thin, with a 4mm diameter.
The cooler exhibits superb quality of manufacture on every side. Just take a look at this cutie:
The copper heatsink is cooled by an 80x80mm fan that hangs on a plastic frame with its blades facing downwards:
According to the monitoring tools, the fan has a constant speed of 2550rpm (its specified speed is 2700rpm). It sounded rather noisy, making me doubtful about the specified level of noise (22dBA). My suspicions were later confirmed by the noise level tests.
The copper ribs are set 1.5mm apart from each other. The cooler’s base is about 7 millimeters thick.
Removing the fan, you can see that the pipes do not have contact with the heatsink’s copper ribs through all of their length:
This may have something to do with the production technology, but it is going to tell negatively on cooler performance.
An aluminum mounting frame is secured on the heatsink base:
Its design and size makes it clear that the DiamondCool is meant for LGA775 mainboards exclusively. I don’t know why the manufacturer didn’t make a mounting frame for K8 processors.
The base is not as high quality as the rest of the cooler:
The undulations on the cooler’s sole can be seen as well as felt with your fingers.
You have to take the mainboard out of the system case to install this cooler. This is in fact the single inconvenience in the installation procedure. The cooler is just screwed on to the back-plate and that’s all. The DiamondCool is small and will fit easily within the mainboard’s components.
Inside a system case, it looks like this:
The DiamondCool comes at a recommended price of $25.
The cardboard boxes of the three other coolers from Spire are designed identically and have robust plastic cases inside:
This section is about VertiCool IV. Besides a large cardboard box, the cooler is packed into a transparent blister pack.
The travel and time have frayed the packaging which doesn’t look tidy anymore. The cooler is firmly fixed in a separate compartment inside the box. Its accessories are underneath it:
The two Spire coolers I’ll discuss in the next section come with this set of accessories, too (except that the Fourier III model lacks a speed controller). The Starts-420 thermal grease is very efficient according to our tests. Its stabilization period is 7 days, by the way.
Here it is, Spire VertiCool IV:
The tower-like design of this 71x98x123mm cooler is nothing new overall, yet it features a few interesting solutions. It’s clear even from its photo that the cooler is all made from copper, except for the fan. The manufacturer does not declare the weight and I didn’t have a balance at hand to measure it myself, but the cooler feels rather heavy.
A number of thin copper plates are put on the four copper heat pipes with a diameter of about 5.5 millimeters.
A 90x90x25mm fan is attached to one side of the heatsink. The cooler’s ribs are curved downwards on the sides thus making up a blank side panel:
This helps put the airflow to maximum use and avoid losing air at the heatsink sides. Note that the pipes are tilted in the same direction as the airflow and the heatsink is shifted relative to the cooler’s central axis, but the fan makes the cooler symmetrical again.
Note also that the four heat pipes do not go through the base, but only go out of it. As a result, the heat flow is distributed to each heatsink side with two pipes rather than four as it might have been.
These photographs show that the cooler’s heatsink is symmetrical and permits to install one more 92mm fan for exhaust, but another pair of wire clips that would help do that is not included into the box. By the way, the official cooler description mentions a special fan fastening mechanism that suppresses vibration and noise. I’m not sure what it means because the direct contact between the heatsink and the fan, which is pressed down with two clips, cannot be regarded as an anti-vibration mechanism. There are no rubber pins or soft spacers in the VertiCool IV kit as well as in the other cooler kits from Spire.
The cooler’s base is protected from scratches and other damage with a piece of polyethylene film with a warning that you should remove it prior to installation. The heat pipes are inserted into other pipes in the bottom, the middle pair of pipes being placed higher than the two outermost ones.
This resembles me the aluminum heatsinks of low-end GlacialTech coolers that have such waves at their bottom, too. It’s hard to tell what effect, if any, this thickening of the middle part of the base has on cooler performance.
The base is finished much better than the base of the above-described DiamondCool:
There is no mirror shine yet, but at least you can feel no undulation. The base is perfectly flat.
The Spire VertiCool IV is equipped with a 92mm translucent fan:
The fan’s seven blades create an airflow of 36.8 to 58.2CFM at a rotation speed of 2000 to 3500rpm (set with the included speed controller). The manufacturer declares a noise level of 19.0 to 26.0dBA but I’ll check this out in the appropriate section of the review.
To install the cooler you only have to attach an appropriate pair of fasteners to its base (Socket 754/939/940, Socket AM2 and LGA775 platforms are supported) and fasten the cooler to a back-plate through your mainboard which you have taken out of the system case beforehand. Installed on a mainboard, the Spire VertiCool IV looks like this:
Hovering high above the mainboard’s PCB, the heatsink won’t hit against the near-socket components. The cooler itself is rather compact, by the way.
The recommended price of the Spire DiamondCool is $40.
The next two coolers from Spire have similar names, Fourier III and Fourier IV, and similar designs as well, so I will discuss them both together in one section.
The packaging is identical for both models, the same as the VertiCool IV package:
The same set of accessories can be found inside but the coolers are completely different:
The Fourier III and IV consist of an aluminum and copper heatsink, respectively, which hangs on four copper heat pipes going out of a copper base.
The Fourier III heatsink is designed for a 120mm fan and measures 137x126x104 millimeters. The all-copper Fourier IV (126x107x99mm) employs a 92mm fan. The manufacturer doesn’t declare the weight parameter, unfortunately. I can only say that the Fourier III is much lighter than the Fourier IV as well as than the VertiCool IV.
The plates in the coolers’ heatsinks are placed at a distance of 1.5 millimeters. There is a depression in the middle of the ribs in the dead space under the fan motor. Its purpose is unclear.
If it was made to reduce the weight of the heatsink, I doubt the reduction is substantial.
The fan is fastened on the heatsink with two wire clips in such a way that it drives air from below upwards to the heatsink ribs.
The simple and handy fastening mechanism allows to turn the fan around in the opposite direction, driving the airflow towards the CPU rather than away from it. I will test the cooler with the fan in both positions to see how this affects its performance.
The heat pipes of the Fourier IV are bent more than those of the Fourier III. As a result, the copper heatsink has a negative slope angle relative to the mainboard while the aluminum one is parallel to the mainboard surface.
There is a thickening in the base of each cooler under the middle pipes, just like in the VertiCool IV:
A distinguishing feature of the Fourier coolers is that the 120mm fan of model III has a constant speed of 1500rpm while the speed of the 92mm fan of the Fourier IV can be varied from 2000 to 3500rpm using the speed controller. The latter is a copy of the one included with the VertiCool IV.
The base of each cooler is finished equally well: its quality somewhere in between the DiamondCool and the VertiCool IV.
You’ll need a metal back-plate to install the cooler on any of the supported platforms. You have to take the mainboard out of the system case to do that but the first thing you should do is to secure an appropriate fastener on the cooler’s base:
LGA775
Socket 754/939/940
Socket AM2
And then the cooler is mounted on the CPU using the back-plate:
There are two holes in each leg of the back-plate so that it could be used on Socket AM2 as well LGA775 mainboards. The back-plate has a sticky multilayer pad that prevents the contacts on the reverse side of the mainboard from closing.
The Fourier IV looks like this inside a system case:
The mounting holes around Socket LGA775 being symmetrical, the cooler can be oriented in any of the four possible directions. I installed it in such a way that the ends of its pipes faced upwards. Note that this orientation of the cooler is only possible due to the Thermaltake Extreme Spirit II cooler installed on the chipset. If the standard passive heatsink or a cooler like Cooler Master Blue Ice Pro were installed on the mainboard’s chipset, it would get in the way of the pipes and the Fourier IV would have to be oriented differently.
Moreover, the cooler’s heatsink is tilted downwards and the fan is a mere 5 millimeters away from the power coils and capacitors in the mainboard’s near-socket area.
If some elements were taller or had heatsinks, there would be problems installing the Fourier IV on the mainboard. Perhaps the installation would be absolutely impossible.
Despite its larger dimensions, the Spire Fourier III is less fastidious in terms of compatibility.
There is over 3 centimeters from the mainboard surface to the bottom of the fan of the Fourier III.
I don’t know the recommended price of the Fourier IV and III coolers but they are selling for no more than $50. The manufacturer recommends using both these models in passive mode (i.e. without a fan) on CPUs with low power dissipation.
The following table lists the specifications of the discussed coolers from Spire:
I took two coolers from different price segments as opponents to the four products from Spire in today’s tests. These two are a Hyper TX from Cooler Master that costs $22 (for details see our article called Originality or Efficiency? Cooler Master Mars, Eclipse and Hyper TX Cooling Solutions Reviewed) and a Thermaltake Big Typhoon in its standard version with a 1400rpm fan (for details see our article called Four CPU Coolers from Thermaltake Tested). The Typhoon costs $38-40.
As for the Spire coolers, I tested the VertiCool IV with its stock fan as well as with an identical additional fan installed for exhaust. The Fourier III and IV were tested with their fans facing upwards (by default) as well as downwards to the CPU. The 120mm system fan opposite the CPU socket was installed for exhaust and intake, respectively.
The coolers were tested on an open testbed as well as in a system case with the following configuration:
The peak CPU frequency was limited by the efficiency of the weakest cooler as well as by the extremely hot summer weather. The quad-core CPU was overclocked only to 2900MHz (a frequency gain of 20.8%) without a voltage increase.
The mainboards’ automatic fan speed management is disabled for the time of the tests. The thermal throttling of the Intel Core 2 Duo processor is controlled with RightMark CPU Clock Utility version 2.25.
All tests are performed in Windows XP Professional Edition Service Pack 2. SpeedFan 4.32 is used to monitor the temperature of the CPUs, reading it from the CPU sensor. The CPU is heated up by means of OverClock Checking Tool version 1.1.0 in a 25-minute test in which the system remains idle in the first and last 4 minutes.
The TAT program I had used earlier in my cooler reviews can heat an Intel Core 2 Quad up by 2-4°C more than the OCCT does, but the OverClock Checking Tool is more practical and issues an error message if the CPU is unstable. The TAT goes on working under such conditions.
I perform at least two cycles of tests and wait for 25-30 minutes for the temperature to stabilize during each test cycle. The maximum temperature of the hottest CPU core in the two test cycles is considered as the final result (if the difference is not bigger than 1°C – otherwise the test is performed once again). Despite the stabilization period, the result of the second cycle is usually 0.5-1°C higher.
The ambient temperature was monitored by means of an electric thermometer and remained at 27.5-28°C during the tests (there was a temperature of 32-34°C outdoors). The fan rotation speed is shown in the diagram as reported by monitoring tools.
When tested with the fan turned around to face the mainboard, the Fourier IV and III coolers are marked in the diagrams with the word “Rev.” The red line shows the level of room temperature. Here are the results:
A few comments on the numbers. First, the Fourier coolers have a wrong fan orientation by default. The test results show that their performance improves considerably if the fan is turned around in such a way as to drive air towards the mainboard. The system fan on the side panel contributes to the overall result because the improvement is not as big on the open testbed as it is in the closed system case, but performance improves anyway.
Talking about specific models, the DiamondCool is a weak and noisy device with low cooling performance. The VertiCool IV and both Fourier are mediocre models as even at their maximum speed they cannot compete with the Cooler Master which costs half the money. I don’t even compare them with the Thermaltake Big Typhoon which didn’t think much of both the four overclocked cores and the summer heat.
With this review we introduce noise level measurements into our cooler reviews. The measurement method still needs improvements so your feedback (in our forum) will be welcome.
So, the level of noise from the coolers is measured with a digital noise-level meter Center-321 (0.1dB accuracy) using A-curve weighing.
The ambient noise was as low as 31.6dBA which equals a totally quiet apartment at night. The measurements were performed at a distance of 1 meter from the system case. I also measured the level of noise at a distance of 3 centimeters from each noise source.
First of all I wanted to check out the level of noise at a distance of 1 meter from the closed testbed by turning on each of its components one by one.
The graphics card was equipped with a passive cooler so I didn’t measure its noise.
Here are the results:
Subjectively, the level of 36-37dBA seems to be the comfortable limit. The fan on the side panel of the system case produces a sort of a rumble notwithstanding its low speed (1000rpm) – this can be seen in the noise level graph above. A curious thing, the noise of a single click of a Logitech M-BA47 mouse is as loud as 45.5dBA as measured from a distance of 55 centimeters. :)
And the following diagram shows the level of noise of each tested cooler as measured at a distance of 1 meter from a closed and fully functional system case (with the side-panel fan turned off) as well as at a distance of 3 centimeters when the CPU cooler was the only operating thing. The comfortable level of 36-37dBA is marked with a dashed line in the diagram.
I guess the diagram makes everything clear. Subjectively, coolers with a noise level of below 38dBA are audible, although not loud. The fan under the Fourier IV heatsink is really quiet (35.4dBA) while the other coolers can be heard. The Fourier IV is also the loudest cooler when it is working at its max speed of 3280rpm in a closed system case.
Although the 120mm fan of the Fourier III cooler has a rotation speed higher than that of the Thermaltake Big Typhoon by about 100rpm, its noise level is somewhat lower inside a system case. This must be due to the position of the fan under rather than above the heatsink. But the Big Typhoon is the quietest cooler in this test when measured from a distance of 3 centimeters.
Cutting it brief, there is nothing extraordinary about the reviewed coolers from Spire from an overclocker’s point of view. Their only good points are universality (except for the DiamondCool) and certain originality of the heatsinks, although the latter thing can hardly appeal much to a potential buyer.
Now, about each cooler, in brief:
The DiamondCool is the least outstanding model among the pretty mediocre coolers from Spire. Its average cooling performance and high level of noise cannot appeal to a potential buyer, let alone an overclocker. The lusterless results of the DiamondCool can only be justified somewhat by its rather low price of $26.
The VertiCool IV model would have done better if it had four heat pipes on both sides of its copper heatsink rather than two as it has now. This cooler doesn’t prove really worthy of its price even with two high-speed fans.
The Fourier III and Fourier IV are the most interesting products of the company. The aluminum Fourier III seems to be preferable in terms of weight and compatibility with mainboards as well as in cooling performance. This cooler is also cheaper than the all-copper Fourier IV. But don’t forget to turn their fans around right away!