Ultra's ChillTec CPU Cooler: Perfect For Your Ultra-Hot System?- Page 4/5
April 18, 2007
By
Thomas Soderstrom
Performance
Our "modern" processors are far too efficient to prove the true capacity of so large a cooler, so we tested the Ultra ChillTec using a horribly inefficient (and startlingly old) overclocked Prescott 530 core Pentium 4. Our particular Prescott is from one of the earliest and most inefficient Intel releases, but we decided to "shoot for the moon" on overclocking anyway.
Notice that we have two overclock speed listed: Given the enormous cooling potential of TEC, we tried "everything" to reach 4.0GHz…but failed, even at ridiculously high voltage levels that we're embarrassed to speak of. Choosing 3.90GHz instead allowed us to drop the CPU core voltage to a still-naughty 1.5875V while exceeding our heat-induced 3.80GHz/1.525V previous "speed limit."
Testing consisted of running 3DMark2001SE in continuous looping mode for approximately one hour at the above clocks and voltage levels, exiting at the "Dragolithic: High-Detail" fire shot to take an immediate reading from the temperature displayed using nVidia nTune monitor on this ECS-branded 680i SLI motherboard.
Using the previously-awarded Cooler Master Hyper TX as the "performance air" standard, the first thing we noticed was that nVidia's 680i reference design motherboard reports much higher CPU temperatures than those seen from similar tests using Intel chipset products. At these temperatures, the CPU was not able to be overclocked farther regardless of voltage selected.
Ultra's ChillTec remained cool enough that we could easily go farther. An increase of around 100MHz in CPU clock speed isn't exactly putting this processor in the hall of fame, but is certainly notable given that the competition had already crossed the CPU's stability threshold temperature.
We estimate maximum noise for the Ultra ChillTec CPU cooler at around 30db, which isn't too far off Ultra's 28db stated maximum…so they could be right. That's only around 4-6db more than the Cooler Master HyperTX and well within tolerable range for most performance fiends.
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