Tom's Hardware > All Reviews > Components > Cooling > CPU Cooler Charts 2008, Part III – Are Box Coolers any Good?

Thermal Compound - The Right Stuff

11:30 - Wednesday 13 February 2008 by Daniel Schuhmann

In order to level the playing field among the coolers in this roundup, we tested each of them with the same thermal compound, namely Amasan T12. In the past we have already witnessed that the choice of thermal compounds can have a great impact on cooling performance. For example, the Pentium 660 could not be cooled sufficiently when we used a different brand of thermal grease, which resulted in the CPU throttling its clock speed.

One of the specialties of Intel’s box coolers is the thermal compound that they use. However, it usually cannot be used anymore once you upgrade your CPU. To see how it fares against the Amasan T12, we tested both the aluminium and the copper core cooler (slower fan version) with Intel’s own thermal grease as well.

The results were quite unexpected. Using Intel’s thermal compound, even the aluminium version is able to cool our quad-core CPU to 88°C, which is below its throttling temperature. The copper version also improves on its results by a few degrees reaching 83°C. At lower CPU loads, the temperature difference between the Amasan T12 and Intel’s thermal paste is about 3 Kelvin.

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spanner_razor 13/02/2008 14:56

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You slip into German on page 7 around half way up.

joedastudd 13/02/2008 16:09

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spanner_razor :
You slip into German on page 7 around half way up.

I thought hes got to be kidding then I looked down page 7 and lmao. Its a whole paragraph in German.
Question to the article creator; Is this the last in the cpu cooler charts 2008?

b3n 13/02/2008 16:39

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lol @ the German

How come the Arctic Freezer Pro 7 was not covered in this series? It's quite a popular cooler and I would be interested in seeing how it compares (as that's what I'm using).

davedrave 14/02/2008 11:00

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that german has got to be the best typo ever. you tested stock coolers but didnt test an arctic cooler 7? the articles all say that arctic cooling is represented in this test but I fail to see where?das ist nicht los!!

benkraft 14/02/2008 15:19

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spanner_razor :
You slip into German on page 7 around half way up.

My apologies.
Thanks for the heads-up...
We translators also have our off days. Consider me awake now

wild9 14/02/2008 20:27

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I think box coolers have to compromise between price and performance, so it's pretty much a foregone conclusion as to one's expectation.

However I have had some pleasant surprises; a lot of the boxed AMD processors I have bought (S393 and AM2 in medium speed ranges), have had pretty good coolers. Granted they run on cool processors so they aren't really pushed to the limit, but they do perform excellent: low-noise, good cooling, good MTBF, and decent overclocking results.

Something else I've also noticed - price doesn't buy a good cooler. Some of the more expensive devices are very noisy, bulky and (as I did), you end up wondering where you went wrong. I've bought expensive coolers with copper fins and small fans and had to remove them..they're simply too noisy. I replaced them with devices from Cooler Master etc (some of which were the cheapest I could find i.e. bargain basement), and have had no problems whatsoever. I don't work for Cooler Master but credit is where credit's due - they do their job and they generally do it well.

I think you can get a good boxed cooler, but it's the luck of the draw depending on the platform and particular processor model. If you have an overtly noisy cooler you can always alter your BIOS settings to only spin the fan up when a critical point is reached. Most CPU's just run idle a lot of the time so there's no point suffering or wasting electricity.

p.s. Please..please..manufacturers, you know the LED fans? Please put a switch on them will ya?