Testing

Installation

The installation of this cooler took a good 20 minutes, this is mainly because the only method of installation is by removing your motherboard, carefully lining up the screw holes and then trying to screw it into place. Sounds easy? Well no. The main problem with this cooler is that it doesn’t balance very well when not screwed in so it was a bit of a struggle to get this one installed.

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This cooler isn’t particularly heavy so an improvement Noiseblocker could make is to use the spring-loaded push clips to make installation a lot easier [I'll take screws over push clips any day - Ed.].

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Methodology

All of the testing is carried out with the side panel of the computer case removed. Ambient temperature was 19C throughout. To test 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, CPU Burn-In is used to load both cores to 100%.

As this motherboard also has a temperature sensor in the chipset, we will also measure the temperature of that in the same way as the CPU, in order to get an idea of how effective the ‘collateral’ cooling of the kit is. All testing was carried out with the 4pin motherboard connector being used.

Speedfan was used to take all temperatures.

Test setup