Installation & Testing

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Our test subject today is my backup video card – a Powercolor Radeon 9800 Pro with 128M of RAM. Lucky for this cooler, I will also be using a Silverstone Temjin 6 for the test bed…thanks to its unusual mounting style will place the cooler facing upwards, which will make it look really sweet. I promise that I will get the T6 reviewed soon!  For this review, I opted to go for real world performance instead of synthetic benchmarks. I booted up the system and let it run for about an hour and then took an Idle temperature reading. I then loaded up a 26 bot Onslaught match on Unreal Tournament 2004 and set it to run for 45 minutes, at the end of which I took a second reading. I used an Aerogate 3 fan controller to measure both the card temps and the ambient air temps, so if there was error at least it would be consistent.

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After the stock cooler had gotten its chance, I removed the card from the chassis and removed the stock cooler. The old thermal compound was then cleaned off the GPU. If you’ve never had the pleasure of playing around with thermal grease, I’ll take this moment to mention that it’s very difficult to get off of your skin, and almost impossible to get out of clothes. So, be careful when dealing with it. Getting it on your fingers is almost inevitable, but generally you can get a good pumice hand cleaner from an auto parts store that will do wonders getting the gunk off of you, but don’t use it on the chip!

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That was the hard part, thankfully. Next, a quick check on the back of the packaging indicated that I should use bracket A and hole 1. The brackets have the letter stamped right on them, and the holes are numbered in a similar fashion. The two stand offs were then installed into the two “#1” holes. At this point, if you’re planning on using the RAMsinks, now would be a good time to install them. The cooler is big enough to cover the chips when installed, which would make the job a bit harder. I decided not to bother with them for the time being…they’re mostly for show anyway.

I chose to use Arctic Silver 5 instead of the supplied thermal grease, and a thin layer was applied. If you can imagine what a small square of paper would look like lying on top of the GPU, that’s about how much thermal grease you want on there. It is a bit of an art form, so just take your time. Remember to leave a little bit of a gap around the edge, so that the grease does not ooze off onto the circuit board. After that, a small insulation pad was installed on the backside of the GPU, to protect the board from the bracket.

All that was left to do was place the cooler on the card and tighten down the screws. I tightened down the screws as much as I felt safe to do, but the cooler was still seemed a little bit loose. Hopefully that will change once the thermal grease sets.

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So, the card was finally ready to be reinstalled. This cooler is big enough where you’re going to lose the PCI slot right next to the AGP, which might be an issue on a smaller mATX board but is not the case with this full size Intel ATX board. Once again, the test cycle was performed and the data is presented in the table below. The fan is not so bad once it is installed into a case…an average machine probably makes enough noise that you won’t notice it. For you silence freaks, you will probably not be happy with the noise level even in a case.

Very impressive…There’s not much of a contest with those numbers!

Next: Conclusions