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| Thermal Measurements |
| Idle and Load conditions |
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All tests were conducted in a controlled environment. Precautions were taken so that the ambient temperature would stay at a constant 28-30 degrees Celsius. To guage our processor's temperature under load, two instances of Folding at Home were used to keep the processor running at 100% utilization. All measurements were taken after a period of 3 hours of testing. The compared cooling solutions are the Intel Stock heatsink, and the Thermalright SLK948U. Artic Alumina thermal compound was used throughout all the test setups. Overclocked settings were adjusted through the system BIOS.
When idle at default clock speeds, all of the cooling solutions performed similarly, with only 5 degrees separating the pack. Even the Intel stock heatsink is on par with the Asetek water cooling kit here. However, when the system was put under a heavy load for 3 hours, the Asetek kit performed very well, especially with the fans running at full speed with a 12v feed. We'd also like to note how silent the Asetek kit was during our testing. The two air cooled solutions were reletively loud, but the Asetek kit it was almost dead silent. When running the fans at 7v, the WaterChill was nearly inaudible.
For the overclocked tests, we ran the processor with an FSB of 240MHz and 1.6V going to the core. When overclocked, the true performance advantage of the Asetek water cooling kit is revealed. The temperature here is only 2C degrees higher then it was at the stock settings, and it stomps on one of the best air cooling solutions currently available, the SLK948U. Even the near silent 7V operation mode for the fans on the Antartica, does a excellent job at cooling the processor down. Intel's stock heatsink simply ran out of gas however and the system was completely unstable at 3.6GHz.
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