by Sergey Lepilov
05/14/2007 | 03:24 PM
The first thermo-electric cooler using heatpipes that we tested in our lab was Titan Amanda TEC (for details see our article called Titan Amanda TEC (Thermal Electronic Chip) Cooler Review).
<%BANNER[article]%>Despite the drawbacks that we pointed out in our article, this cooling solution based on medium-power Peltier element still demonstrated pretty impressive cooling efficiency with overclocked processors. As it happens pretty frequently, the launch of this cooling solution stimulated other cooling product makers to start rolling out their alternatives using thermo-electric technology. This is how Vigor Monsoon II and our today’s hero, Ultra Chill-TEC, cooling solutions came into this world.
Here it is:
Despite external resemblance with the Titan offspring that I have mentioned above, Ultra Chill-TEC boasts a number of distinguishing features that have had positive as well as negative effect on its cooling efficiency. Therefore, it definitely deserves out special attention and detailed testing.
Moreover, today we get a great chance to actually update our Titan Amanda review, because it received a lot of complaints from our readers for the absence of proper “hot” dual-core processor during our test session. Besides, since the Titan Amanda TGEC Review came out, we have also got our hands on a highly efficient cooling solution that also proudly bears the word “Ultra” in its name. So we have every right to call our today’s test session not a super-cooler battle, but Ultra-cooler battle. :)
So, let’s get started!
The cooler comes in a large colorful box with the picture of Ultra Chill-TEC and the list of all its key features on the front:
If you study the box carefully, you can learn the cooler’s detailed specifications, components and work principles:
Inside the box the cooler and its accompanying accessories are packed in a plastic casing. The plastic packs are firmly secured inside plastic foam casing, which protects the device against any possible damage during transportation:
Moreover, all accessories are packed into a separate box instead of being scattered around in small plastic bags, like we have seen by some other manufacturers:
Inside the box there are the following things:
Besides that the box also contains a cooler control and monitoring unit:
It is designed to fit into the 5-inch bay of the system chassis perfectly.
There is nothing dramatically new about the design of Ultra Chill-TEC cooler. It sits on copper nickel-plated base with the built-in Peltier element. There are heatpipes coming out of the Peltier element and going through aluminum fin array:
Just like Titan Amanda TEC, the cooler’s heatsink consists of two independent parts (each sitting on a separate pair of heatpipes) and is covered with metal casing:
The only difference is that Ultra Chill-TEC, unlike Amanda TEC, is equipped with only one 92-mm fan, not 32mm but the standard 25mm wide. The use of only one fan for air intake and no option of installing another fan onto the cooling solution is the major drawback of the newcomer. It is so significant that all of its great advantages cannot really make up for it, which we will show later in this article. Despite high fan rotation speed that varies automatically between 2,000rpm and 2,800rpm, it is still not efficient enough to ensure sufficient heatsink cooling. But again, we are going to dwell on it later in the thermal performance section of this review.
Note that the casing is so short that there is nothing you could fasten the second fan to:
Of course, you can use your imagination and try finding some ways to install an additional fan for air outtake (for example by building a cover casing of your own), but this will hardly be an acceptable solution for most users.
We were a little discouraged by the fact that both side panels and the top panel of the casing that serve mostly decorative purposes were pretty heavy and add even more to the total weight of this massive cooling solution (Ultra Chill-TEC weighs 985g):
I think they could have designed a thin aluminum casing and this way reduced the cooler weight a little bit. I wonder why they didn’t do it this way?
I would like to draw your attention to the fact that the base is perfectly even and the finish quality is extremely high:
We have already described the working principle of a thermo-electric cooler in our article called Titan Amanda TEC (Thermal Electronic Chip) Cooler Review. This time I would only like to share with you a scheme borrowed from the official Ultra Chill-TEC web-page:
We have already dwelled on the lack of additional fan and some differences in the fan design that have negative effect on the cooling efficiency of this solution. Now we would like to stress one of the most significant advantages of this product; the control unit that comes bundled with it. If you remember in case of Titan Amanda TEC the control functions were performed by a small PCI card installed into the corresponding mainboard PCI slot. In case of Ultra Chill-TEC there is a special unit that fits into the 5-inch bay of the system chassis:
The unit is equipped with an LCD display with a choice of backlight colors (you can set it to yellow, green, blue, light-blue or purple) and a button to switch between temperature scales: Fahrenheit/Centigrade. No other functions are available unfortunately.
On the rear side of the box there is a connector for the thermo-electric unit, a connector for control and monitoring cable and a power connector:
The control unit is not a small one: 150mm x 147mm x 43mm, so I decided to take a peak inside. It turned out that there isn’t much really:
And the unit has been made quite long to make it easier for you to connect the cables to its rear panel, inside there are only two connector chips:
The control unit is responsible for proper functioning of the Peltier module and adjusts its power automatically depending on the current temperature. It also adjusts the fan rotation speed. Besides that, the unit also performs some monitoring functions that have been implemented in a pretty original way:
Besides the temperature of the Peltier element and the operational time, the LCD display also features an animated image of a digging man. The more active is the Peltier element and the cooler overall, the faster is the man digging. It struck me as a pretty strange association, I have to admit :)
There is a special backplate that you need to use to install the cooler onto any of the supported platforms, so you will have to remove the system board from the case for any installation. However, before we move on to the mainboard we need to fasten the proper retentions to the cooler base:
LGA 775
Socket 754/939/940
Socket AM2
The great retention design and symmetrical retention holes in the cooler base are indisputable advantages of Ultra Chill-TEC compared with Titan Amanda TEC. There were absolutely no problems with the proper contact between the cooler base and the CPU heatspreader. Moreover, you can install the retention clips for K8 processors facing any direction that would be best for ensuring more efficient airflow from the cooler fan:
Once the retentions have been fastened and the backplate has been installed as instructed using soft padding and plastic plate, all you have to do is set the cooler onto the backplate rods and then tighten the spring screws. The cooler is pressed very firmly against the CPU, but thanks to the backplate the mainboard will not bend under the cooler weight.
And at last you fit the control unit into the free 5-inch bay of your system case and connect all the cables to it. The last thing you do is connect the fan rotation speed monitoring cable to the mainboard.
The assembled system with the Ultra Chill-TEC cooler installed looks as follows:
We you can see, since the cooler fan and heatsink are sitting pretty high up, Ultra Chill-TEC will not obstruct any of the electronic components on the mainboard in the area around the processor. Even if your system is using Corsair Dominator TWIN2X2048-9136C5D with tall heat-spreaders, you won’t need to mode the modules into the farther slots: Ultra Chill-TEC will not be in the way at all.
The fan highlighting is quite impressive, the modding fans will love it:
However, the fan is quite noisy even at minimal rotation speed. And at the maximum speed the noise is simply unbearable. So, the beautiful blue fan highlighting will not make up for this inconvenience.
The table below contains the technical specifications of the Ultra Chill-TEC cooling solution:
Since the manufacturer positions Ultra Chill-TEC cooler as a highly efficient cooling solution with superior thermal performance, it will have a proper rival to compete with. I am sure that if you have been reading our cooling reviews regularly you already know who that is going to be. Yes, Enzotech Ultra-X cooler that boasts unprecedented efficiency among air-cooling systems these days. Besides the tests in quiet mode at 1350rpm fan rotation speeds this cooler was also tested at its maximum fan rotation speed of 2500rpm. Note the fan rotation speeds on the charts below are reported according to the monitoring data, and not according to the specs.
We will investigate the thermal performance of Ultra Chill-TEC cooler in a closed system case and in an open testbed. We had our platforms built according to the following configuration:
All tests were performed in Windows XP Professional Edition Service Pack 2. We used SpeedFan 4.32 to monitor the temperature of the CPU by reading it from the CPU Sensor. The CPU was warmed up with Intel Thermal Analysis Tool (TAT) for 25 minutes (according to the method described in our article called Originality or Efficiency? Cooler Master Mars, Eclipse and Hyper TX Cooling Solutions Reviewed).
The mainboards’ automatic fan speed management in the BIOS 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 2.25 (our processor began to skip clock cycles on reaching a temperature of 81.5°C+).
I performed at least two cycles of tests in each mode and waited for 25-30 minutes for the temperature to stabilize during the tests in closed system case. During the tests on an open testbed we took half the time for temperature stabilization. The maximum temperature in the two test cycles was considered as the final result (if the difference was not bigger than 1°C – otherwise the test was performed at least once again). Despite the stabilization period, the result of the second cycle was usually 0.5-1°C higher.
The ambient temperature during the test session was monitored with an electric thermometer that could monitor temperature changes over the period of up to 6 hours. The room temperature remained at 25.5°C during the tests (as stated on the charts).
During our test session we could overclock our Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 (2133MHz nominal speed) to 3500MHz by raising the processor Vcore to 1.45V (+64.1%):
Well, now we just have to check which one of the two Ultra coolers is more efficient:
The difference of almost 7°C in thermal performance between the results Ultra Chill-TEC cooler demonstrated in a closed and on an open testbed prove that this thermo-electric cooling solution lacks fresh airflow and that one single 92-mm fan is not enough. Besides, the cooler is pretty noisy. Even though it is as efficient as the best air cooler in an open testbed, you pay pretty high price for that. On the other hand, Enzotech Ultra-X cooler won the today’s ultra-cooler duel, because it not only ensured highly-efficient CPU cooling at low fan rotation speed and with low level of generated noise, but also provided proper cooling of the elements in the area around the processor socket. Something that the cooling solutions with the Ultra Chill-TEC design will never be able to offer.
There is one more thing that I would like to point out here. As you know, the monitoring LCD displays the thermo-electric module temperature and it starts functioning at full power (50W) when the temperature hits 25°C. Unfortunately, the manufacturer doesn’t specify the temperature of what side of the Peltier element is being monitored by the control unit. And this is actually very interesting to know, because I didn’t see anything higher than 38°C on the LCD screen even when the CPU was loaded to its maximum. Considering that the difference between the CPU core temperature and TEC control unit readings is pretty significant, I dare assume that the LCD display reports the temperature of the top Peltier element plate. So, what could be the practical value of these temperature reports if the numbers are so far from the actual CPU temperature? – I have hard time answering this question.
I have to admit that I was somewhat disappointed with the Ultra Chill-TEC thermo-electric cooler. Of course, it boasts some indisputable advantages compared with Titan Amanda TEC. Among them are free cooler positioning inside the system case, the control unit that doesn’t take any PCI slots on the mainboard, and fan highlighting, which looked very fancy. However, we shouldn’t also disregard some of the negative sides to the picture that may balance the scale not in the cooler’s favor: high price, high level of generated noise even at minimal fan rotation speed, high power consumption of 50W, heavy weight and dependence on the air circulation inside the system case. Seems like a lot…
On the other hand, if you are not bothered by the noise from the cooler fans, and do not have a closed system case but rather an open platform, something like what we have in our labs, then the thermo-electric cooler we discussed today may become a pretty good choice for your overclocking needs. Besides, you can work on the casing covering the heatsink in order to make it more light-weight (by replacing the pads), think of a way to install a second fan and replace the original fan with a quieter one. However, even though these are the things you could do, I doubt that you will be willing to deal with it after paying $130 for the cooling system.
In conclusion, we would like to sum up once again all the highs and lows of this interesting cooler and we hope that our experience will help improve its efficiency and make it a more attractive buy for the users.
Highs:
Lows: