by Sergey Lepilov
09/14/2006 | 02:45 PM
There’s nothing new about the idea of utilizing Peltier elements in PC cooling systems. A few years ago Thermaltake introduced its SubZero4G, but that cooler had unsatisfactory performance and also cost as much as $160. This review is going to show you how the industry has progressed since then. The Titan Amanda TEC cooler with a Peltier element is offered today for half that price!
I won’t dwell upon the principle behind the Peltier element since you can find a lot of relevant info around the Web. So, let’s get right to the coolers to be tested.
Titan’s Amanda TEC coolers aren’t universal: there are two versions for Intel (LGA755) and AMD (Socket 754/939/940 and Socket AM2) platforms that have different model names, TTC-NP04TZ and TTC-NP02TZ, respectively.
Apart from the fastening elements, these systems are identical and have identical specifications, so I will be discussing the LGA775 version in this section, but will also tell you about the Socket 939 fastening.
The cooler comes in a small cardboard box with a plastic carry handle:
The small window in the front side gives you a view of the top part of the cooler and of the ends of the heat pipes. On the back side you can see a chart that shows how air flows through the cooler’s heatsink. The key product features are also listed there. A detailed cooler specification is printed on a side panel:
The box is identical for both versions of the cooler. The model contained within is indicated by the red circle in the appropriate specification column.
Inside the package you will find a small box with accessories and a Titan Amanda TEC cooler, in a special plastic envelope that keeps the cooler fixed firmly in place.
Before examining the cooler, let’s take a look at the accessories supplied with it:
Here is the controller card that is to be installed into your mainboard’s PCI slot:
The card is very small at 136x121x21mm and will easily fit into any system case. You have to put up with losing one PCI slot although new mainboards don’t have too many of them.
The Titan Amanda TEC is a tower-design cooler with four heat pipes and two fans for taking air in and exhausting it.
The first pair of heat pipes takes heat off the bottom plate of the copper base which is nickel-plated to prevent corrosion (quoting the manufacturer). Next goes a 60W Peltier element that pumps heat up from its bottom to top, above which another nickel-plated copper plate is located.
Two more heat pipes take heat away from the top plate. The plates are fastened together with four spring-loaded screws. You can see traces of thermal grease along their edges. Judging by the color and consistence, it is Titan TTG-G30010 thermal grease which you’ll find included with your Amanda.
Each pair of pipes transfers heat over to its own half of the heatsink. You can see it consists of two halves if you take a look at the bottom of the cooler:
Note that the air stream from the cooler’s fans is directed in such a way that the heatsink’s half that is connected to the bottom part of the base – which is in contact with the CPU – is cooled first. The other heatsink dissipates heat from the two pipes that go from the plate which has contact with the top of the Peltier element. So, the fans first cool the cooler half of the heatsink and then the hotter one, which seems quite logical to me.
The whole arrangement is covered with a metal casing that is fastened with screws along the cooler’s perimeter.
Without the casing, the Amanda TEC looks small and somewhat alike to the Scythe Ninja:
This photo shows clearly how the cooler’s heatsink is divided into two parts.
The Amanda TEC is equipped with two 92x92x32mm fans for intake and exhaust.
According to the specs, the fans rotate at 1500rpm and produce 20dBA of noise. The airflow created at this rather low rotation speed is strong thanks to the thickness of the fan (32 millimeters as opposed to the standard thickness of 25 millimeters).
I found the specifications of the fan by its marking, TFD-9232L12Z, at the Titan website. It has a rotation speed of ~1800rpm and creates airflow of 34.56CFM. According to the mainboards’ monitoring tools, the average rotation speed of the cooler’s fans was 1680rpm during my tests which is below the figure declared in the fan specs but a little higher than in the cooler specs.
The fans are fastened to the heatsink with four screws through soft spacers to reduce vibration and noise:
Against my expectations, the quality of the cooler’s base turned to be not very high:
Yes, it is flat, but where is the mirror shine I used to see on other coolers from Titan? There are even two small scratches (I made the photo before installing the cooler, so that was no fault of mine). Such small defects could be seen on the bases of both cooler models, for LGA775 and for Socket 754/939/940.
It is easy to install the cooler on the mainboard but there are a few things you should take care of. First, you have to take the mainboard out of the system case. It’s not convenient but the Amanda TEC is fastened through the mainboard’s PCB. It seems simple: you take the back-plate, apply some thermal grease, and fasten the cooler with screws and nuts.
Make sure that you won’t damage any mainboard elements and tighten the screws. However, it is my rule to check out the contact between the cooler and the CPU heat-spreader before each test, so I took the cooler off to see the following:
The problem was that the barrels of the cooler’s fastening plate would press against the mainboard before a tight contact between the cooler’s base and the CPU heat-spreader could be achieved.
The installation guide told me those barrels were supposed to be inserted into the mainboard’s holes, but they were obviously too large to fit. So, I found the following solution: I put spacers under the fastening plate to lift it higher above the mainboard surface. I had to unfasten the screws that were sealed with some glue:
Then I put three spacers, like those you can find included with mainboards, under the screws:
As a result, the mounting plate got a little higher above the mainboard, giving me 1.5-2 millimeters that were necessary for proper contact:
By the way, I had no such problem on the LGA775 platform.
Next you should connect the cooler to the PCI controller and to the mainboard. It’s simple because the connectors differ in shape and you can’t confuse them. You can also find the connection diagram in the user manual (a 690KB PDF file).
Considering the weight of the cooler, which is 1035 grams, Titan has provided for it to be hung in the system case by means of two cords with spring-loaded locks that you can find in the cooler box. The cords proved to be longer than necessary and I had to wind them around the system case’s stiffening rib, but that was o.k. What’s more important, there had been vibration from the cooler’s two fans, but it vanished as soon as I attached the cords.
As for orienting the cooler on Socket 754/939/940 mainboards, you can position it in any way you think proper by changing the position of the fastening plates with the barrels. The manufacturer’s website says that different mounting plates must be used for Socket AM2 and they are not included with the Titan Amanda TEC (TTC-NP02TZ).
Here is a picture of the cooler installed into a Socket 939 platform:
Note that the cooler’s air stream is directed towards the rear panel of the case where a 120mm 1000rpm fan is located, but the cooler’s exhaust fan is shifted a little relative to the system one. As you can guess, the efficiency of the Titan Amanda TEC depends largely on the airflows inside the system case. For example, it finds itself higher and almost abuts on the 120mm system fan on the Intel platform:
It would be ideal if the exhaust fan of the Amanda TEC were throwing hot air right at a system fan with the same rotation speed. The air would be exhausted out of the system case as if by a tunnel. But of course, the position of the CPU socket on the mainboard and the design of your system case are going to affect this. Note that the Amanda TEC’s fan can even hit against the rear panel or the fan in that panel in some system cases. The dimensions of the cooler from the center of the socket: 85mm length to either side and 47.5mm width to either side. The distance from the mainboard surface to the bottom of the cooler is 48mm.
I want to add a few words about the PCI controller to finish this section of the review:
There are three indicators on the mounting bracket of that card which tell you the status of the Peltier element. The green indicator means that the Peltier element is turned off; this occurs when the CPU temperature is below 25°C. Orange means that the temperature is higher than that and the Peltier unit is turned on. The red indicator would mean that the CPU temperature is below 15°C or higher than 70°C and the card’s speaker would start to beep at that. You can also hear it beep when you shut down your computer.
The following table lists the official specifications of the new coolers from Titan:
I compared the Titan Amanda TEC with a Thermaltake Big Typhoon cooler that was equipped with a 120mm fan and a speed controller (from 800 to 2000rpm), but I didn’t include the stock coolers supplied with boxed Intel Pentium 4 and AMD Athlon 64 processors which had nothing to do in that company. As for other advanced air coolers like Scythe Ninja or Zalman CNPS9500 LED, they have been frequently tested on our site in comparison with the Big Typhoon, so there is no sense to test them yet another time.
The tested was assembled out of the following components:
Note: I installed Chaintech’s GeForce 7950 GX2 graphics card into the AMD platform, but the Intel platform didn’t support that card and I had to use the Sysconn GeForce 7600 GT in it.
The 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, DirectX 9.0c, Catalyst 6.6 and ForceWare 91.31.
SpeedFan version 4.29 was used to monitor the temperatures and fan speeds. The CPU was heated up by running the FPU test from S&M version 1.8.1 (beta) at 100% load for 15 minutes; on the Intel platform I also ran the previous three S&M tests. I also simulated a Game test mode by running 3DMark06’s Firefly Forest test with 16x anisotropic filtering and without full-screen antialiasing for 20 times.
The temperature was read from the sensor integrated into the CPU. The mainboards’ automatic fan speed management was disabled for the time of the tests. The thermal throttling of the Intel Pentium 4 processor was controlled with the ThrottleWatch utility.
The coolers were tested 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. Three test cycles were performed for each cooler and the results were averaged. I waited for 40-45 minutes for the temperature to stabilize during each test cycle.
The ambient temperature was monitored by means of an electric thermometer and remained within 23.4-24.0°C.
Before proceeding to the test results, I want to show you how efficient the new thermal grease enclosed with the Amanda TEC and other new coolers from Titan is.
Titan is known to the hi-tech world not only as a manufacturer of coolers. In the company’s product range there is also such an important item as thermal grease. You may remember Titan’s silver-based grease that had mediocre efficiency and was also hard to scrape off from the CPU. Not long ago Titan used to ship its coolers with Titan Nano Blue thermal grease (TTG-B20015) that was quite competitive against other thermal interfaces. The Titan Amanda TEC comes with Titan Nano Grease (TTG-G30010).
The name of the grease seems to imply the use of nano-technologies in its manufacture which is an encouraging and intriguing fact, so I decided to check it out in comparison with KPT-8, which is one of the best thermal interfaces available here, in Russia.
Here are the official specs of the Titan Nano Grease:
It’s not easy to apply this grease on the CPU because it is very thick and viscous. You have to stretch the grease all over the CPU surface, but be careful lest the thin film should tear and leave blank spots on the surface. Here is how Titan’s TTG-G30010 looks, applied to the CPU and tested:
I tested the efficiency of this thermal interface with a Thermaltake Big Typhoon cooler because it installs much easier than the Titan Amanda TEC does. Here are the results:
Due to obvious reasons, I can’t tell you how durable that thermal interface is and how its properties change over time, yet I can’t but acknowledge that the new thermal grease from Titan performs well and can be recommended for all overclockers. The Amanda coolers were both tested for this review with that thermal interface.
The syringe contains about 1 gram of thermal paste, which is enough for at least a dozen CPUs and coolers.
I overclocked an Athlon 64 3200+ processor from its default 2000MHz to 2785MHz with a voltage increase to 1.675V.
Here are the results of the test:
So, the thermoelectric cooler delivers more performance than one of the best air coolers even when the latter uses a 120mm at 2000rpm (the fan speed of the off-the-shelf Thermaltake Big Typhoon is ~1300rpm). To my mind, however, the advantage is rather small for such a technically advanced and expensive cooling solution. The insignificant temperature reduction provided by the Titan Amanda TEC didn’t help to improve the overclockability of the CPU.
The Intel Pentium 4 524 stepping G1 was overclocked from its default 3060MHz to 4140MHz.
The voltage of this core was increased from the default 1.385V to 1.535V. Unfortunately, the CPU-Z utility doesn’t show the CPU model correctly and doesn’t tell its voltage on the mainboard I used during the test.
Judging by the temperature threshold for the thermal throttling of that CPU, which is about 54-55°C, the mainboard’s monitoring system reports an understated temperature value for this CPU model (by about 10-15°C), so don’t be surprised at the low values. More important is the difference in the CPU temperature between the different coolers. Here are the numbers:
My supposition about the understated temperature values is confirmed by the temperature data in the idle mode when the Peltier element should have shut down, but the orange indicator of the PCI card was still signaling that the thermoelectric unit was active.
Comparing the results of the coolers on the Intel platform, you can see that the Titan Amanda TEC delivers almost the same performance as the Thermaltake Big Typhoon does at 2000rpm fan speed. In its original version the super-cooler is just a little worse than the Titan. Where is the advantage of the thermoelectric cooler? Why can’t the Titan Amanda TEC win on the Intel platform as it did on the AMD one?
As I said above, performance of the Titan Amanda TEC largely depends on its positioning inside the system case and on the placement of system fans, if any. Yet it is on the Intel platform that the air stream from the Titan Amanda TEC should be more efficiently (than on the AMD platform) taken by the system fan and exhausted thanks to the upwards shifted position of the CPU socket. But the new cooler can’t win the test. Why?
Take a look at the graphs of temperature as monitored by the CPU sensor (red) and the two PWM sensors on the mainboard (orange and pink) when the CPU was being cooled by the Titan Amanda TEC.
And here’s the reading of the PWM sensor (I took the reading of the sensor with the highest temperature):
On an open testbed or in a system case, the Titan Amanda TEC doesn’t help reduce the temperature of the mainboard elements around the CPU socket. The temperature is lower on the open testbed, yet the natural convection is still insufficient for efficient cooling of the near-socket space. This can’t but affect the CPU temperature, too. I think it is a considerable disadvantage of the new cooler from Titan.
As for the noise factor, the Amanda’s fans aren’t loud, yet are not quiet, either. Their noise is comparable to the 120mm fan of the Thermaltake Big Typhoon working at 1600-1650rpm.
I’ve got rather ambiguous impressions about the Titan Amanda TEC. On one hand, it is a highly efficient cooler, quiet and with good thermal grease in the box. It is highly efficient with today’s overclocked AMD processors. As for the Intel platform, I should have used a dual-core CPU and the Titan might have been a leader then. Still, I think that coolers are bought for CPUs rather than vice versa. Dual-core heaters from Intel can hardly be interesting nowadays even though they have become cheaper recently. Well, perhaps they are going to be interesting for people who have bought an Amanda TEC.
To my mind, the problem of such coolers is that the era of super-hot processors and, accordingly, of super-efficient coolers has come to an end. After the arrival of the Conroe and the upcoming transition of the Presler and CedarMill processors to the new D0 stepping, you don’t have to worry anymore about excessive heat dissipation of your central processor. CPU overclocking is now mostly limited by the potential of your system RAM and mainboard rather than by the efficiency of CPU cooling. AMD has also introduced processors with a reduced TDP (but even before that, the K8 series have dissipated less heat then Intel’s competing solutions). The old saying “better late than never” doesn’t work here. The Titan Amanda TEC arrives at the moment when its high performance is not called for.
At its price of about $90 the cooler isn’t universal and has to be replaced on you moving to another platform. Also take note of the limitations concerning the free space in your system case, the necessity to ensure good inter-case ventilation, the increased requirements to the power supply, and the lack of cooling of the near-socket space on the mainboard. Yet another small disadvantage is that the cooler requires one PCI slot for its controller card.
And still I’m sure the Titan Amanda TEC will find its customer, mostly thanks to its efficiency. A real overclocker won’t be taken aback by the mentioned difficulties.
Highs:
Lows: