Testing

Test Rig

Installation

As the CoolFlow comes with an Intel S775 push pin mechanism pre-installed, the installation is incredibly simple and entirely tool-less.

The first job is to apply a small blob of thermal paste to your CPU, for this review, we used Arctic Silver 5 as this is the paste most users will use.

All that was then needed was to mount the cooler on the motherboard by locating the pins into the specific pin holes, pushing the pins into place and then attaching the 3-pin power lead to a nearby 3-pin header. This was very simple and is definitely one of the easiest after-market installations I’ve witnessed so far…then again it’s basically the same as the stock Intel cooler.

Click to enlarge

Methodology

To test CPU Coolers we simply boot the PC up with a freshly installed copy of Windows Vista, and measure temperatures under idle and load states. The onboard temperature sensor is disregarded and instead the CPU’s own diode is used.

For idle testing, we simply let the rig sit, doing absolutely nothing for 30 minutes and take the most representative temperature of the last 10 minutes. The same is used for the load testing, but instead of letting the PC do nothing; we load both cores to 100%.

All testing was carried out with the 3pin motherboard connector being used.

Ambient temperatures were at 21 degrees C. The processor was loaded using two instances of CPU Burn-In.

Results were taken while the CPU was under stock, and overclocked states. When at stock, the CPU was at 3GHZ with a FSB of 333MHZ. When overclocked, the CPU was at 3.6 GHZ with a FSB of 400MHZ.

Speedfan was used to take all temperatures.

The CoolFlow was compared to the stock Intel cooler.

All results are when using the coolers with Arctic Silver 5.