System setup and notes
| Cooler | Corsair Hydro H50 | Thermalright Ultra 120 eXtreme | Intel stock cooler | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fan | Corsair 120mm | Thermalright 120mm | Intel 92mm | ||
| Approx. price at time of writing | £59.79 |
£42.54 £52.31 (with 1,600rpm fan) |
£15 |
||
| CPU | Intel Core i7 965 EE @ 3.20GHz (1.2625V in BIOS) and 3.86 GHz (1.3625V in BIOS) | ||||
| Chassis | Akasa Omega | ||||
| Motherboard | Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 | ||||
| BIOS revision | F4b |
||||
| Memory | 6GB Crucial DDR3-1,066 CL7 | ||||
| Graphics Card | Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 512MB | ||||
| Mainboard software | Intel
9.1.1.1012 |
||||
| Graphics driver | CATALYST 9.6 | ||||
| PSU | Corsair HX1000W | ||||
| Operating System | Windows Vista Business SP1, 64-bit | ||||
Tests
| Benchmarks | Prime95 torture test Lavalys Everest Ultimate 5.0.2 data-logging software Highest stable overclock at 1.40V |
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Setup notes
The first set of temperature measurements are taken from the Core i7 965 Extreme Edition (C0 stepping) running at its native speed and voltage - 3.20GHz and 1.2625V, respectively.To stress the coolers some, we've then overclocked the chip to 3.86GHz and raised the processor's Vcore from 1.2625V to 1.3625V to ensure stability and add some real heat into the mix. In this instance, Turbo Boost is turned off.
The actual Core i7 chip is practically irrelevant because recent D0-stepping Core i7 920s have hit 4GHz-plus on basic air cooling: the premise here is to see how the coolers respond to wicking away the heat produced by an over-volted Nehalem CPU.
Housed inside an Akasa Omega with the chassis' front fan - 120mm x 25mm - switched on, only one other fan is used, save for the heatsinks'. The case's rear-mounted 120mm fan is removed when testing the Corsair Hydro H50 but put back in place, as an exhaust fan, for the other coolers, as you will see by going back to the previous page.
The Thermalright Ultra eXtreme 120 is a classy LGA1366 cooler which costs around £43 without a fan and £52 with the 1,600rpm-rated 120mm fan that we've tested with. Note that you can add a second fan to the Ultra 120 eXtreme, for better performance.
Adding some reference numbers by way of an Intel stock heatsink, as found in the PIB (processor-in-box), the air coolers both use Thermalright's TIM.
The stress is created by running the Prime95 torture test on four (50 per cent load) or eight threads (100 per cent load) for a duration of 30 minutes at a time. The ambient, idle, and load temperatures are noted, as well as aural performance.
Lastly, we investigate the highest stable speed with 1.4V inputted in the BIOS.
We tried to keep the ambient temperature steady during testing: it hovered between 21.2°C and 22.5°C.
