Arctic-Cooling Freezer 7 PRO
3. Performance
For our tests, we used Intel's P4 650 3.4GHz processor and P5LD2 Deluxe motherboard from ASUS.
the test PC specs, as reported by CPUZ |
motherboard info by CPUZ... |
To measure the CPU's temperature, we used SpeedFan v4.27, which provided us with real time monitoring and created a graph of the temperature over time. First, we let the processor cool down, in idle for a few minutes and then we ran the Prime 95 - In-place large FFT test to heat it up to its maximum level. The room temperature at the time of the tests was close to 21°C. All the tests were done on our test PC without a PC case. Let's take a look at the graphs with the Stock Box Intel Cooler first...
...48~67°C from idle to full load... |
...and 2625~2740rpm for the stock cooler fan... |
The new P4 generation 6xx with 64bits and 2MB L2 cache have higher temperature levels than the previous 5xx series. In idle, the reported temperature was close to 49°C while under full load, it increased to 67°C. The rotation speed of the stock cooler fan was close to 2625~2740 rpm, without any significant increase under higher temperatures. The voltage for the CPU was close to 1.425v. When we tried to increase it to 1.5v, just to see how the stock cooler would perform with the higher voltage, the reported temperature for the same test was close to 75°C under full load.
Now let's have a look at the results with the Freezer 7 PRO installed this time...
close to 15°C temperature drop!!! |
the average speed of 2500 confirms the specifications... |
With the Freezer 7 PRO on board, things are totally different, even during idle. The CPU runs at 40°C, nine degrees lower than with the stock cooling system from Intel. The amazing thing is that the temperature of 67°C under full load with the stock cooler, is decreased down to 50~52°C, which is fifteen or even more degrees temperature difference. This performance from a normal compact cooling system is more than very good and can be compared to those of small water cooling systems. The noise levels are the same as previous versions of the Freezer 7, which were rather low and with the rotation speed between 2420~2600 rpm. The odd spikes jumping above 2700 rpm are not something to worry about.
Overclocking
For our tests, we used the ASUS P5LD2 Deluxe motherboard and the DDR2 PC2-5400 Gold Dual Channel modules from OCZ.
We had default settings for our Intel P4 650 17 x 200MHz = 3.4GHz. From the BIOS, we overclocked the processor to 4.42GHz. The voltage for the CPU was set at 1.50v. At that speed, the system was able to boot and ran the Prime95 torture test, SiSoft Sandra and PCMark05 tests for the CPU and memory.
It is important to mention that with the stock cooler, the system could not run at such speeds. Over 4.25GHz, it was able to boot but restarted the PC during the tests.
...the Freezer will help you with overclocking... |
Even with increased speed, from 3.4GHz to 4.42GHz, the Freezer 7 PRO did a great job. Without any increase in fan rotation speed, the CPU ran close to 58~59°C under full load with Prime95 or the PCM05 CPU tests, which is even better performance than when running at the default speed with the stock cooler. Simply excellent performance...