Introduction
...the cooling performance is simply excellent. R404a and the BD35F compressor really do the job, it's easy to fit, and I have no complaints with how it actually cooled the test system.
Does it cool well enough compared to a Prometeia Mach II, with its 200W chiller? Yes, even a P4 @ 4GHz+ is within the limits of an XE. All commercial processors can be taken to the limit in an XE...
To quickly sum up what phase change cooling is all about, a compound liquid is compressed, evaporated to a gas at the cooling site thus removing all the heat, condensed back into a liquid and pumped round the system so that it can happen again. This happens constantly, evaporation and condensing, so that your cooling site is constantly cooled. With the VapoChill, the compound liquid and compressor are powerful enough to keep things well below zero degrees celcius at all times.Does it cool well enough compared to a Prometeia Mach II, with its 200W chiller? Yes, even a P4 @ 4GHz+ is within the limits of an XE. All commercial processors can be taken to the limit in an XE...
Read the original article for a more in depth look at how it works, the case and the overall VapoChill experience.
The purpose of this article isn't to review the entire system again, more to see if my initial assertions that "even a P4 @ 4GHz+ is within the limits of an XE" and "All commercial processors can be taken to the limit in an XE" were true. Asetek were keen that I make good on my conclusion and vindicate their product.
Using an AMD processor in the initial article was certainly enough to draw the initial conclusion, but it's always nice to test things out to make sure.
So with that in mind, I enlisted the help of EPoX and sneakily plundered the mighty Intel to give the XE some proper work to do. Asetek were also more than willing to help and tooled me up with the Pentium 4 mounting hardware that I'd need for a Socket 478 board. Finally, just to make things interesting, I didn't use any old Pentium 4 processor. That would have been far too easy. Instead I procured the range topping Athlon FX-51 counter punch, the 3.2GHz Extreme Edition.
Compared to the regular 3.2GHz Pentium 4, the Extreme Edition adds 2MB of L3 cache memory to the mix. Essentially a 2MB L3 Xeon processor (the CPU revision code even matches a Gallatin-class Xeon) sandwiched into the Socket 478 form factor, it's as mighty a processor to cool as you can obtain today. With a higher transitor count than an Athlon FX-51 and regular Pentium 4 3.2Ghz put together, its 231mm² die size, 1.55V core voltage and all that L3 cache memory will conspire to make things very difficult for the XE when overclocked. L3 cache runs at core clock speed, with a latency penalty for accesses the only hindrance to maximum performance.
Want to see what all the fuss is about? Tarinder takes an excellent look at it here.
So new toys rounded up finally, it was time to see if the XE was up to the job.
