OCZ Tempest Cooler Review - PAGE 3

As with pretty much every higher-end heat sink on the market, there is always the chance that you'll have to pop the motherboard out of its case -- oh well, no one said being a hardware geek was easy. Installation on S939/S940/AM2 systems takes advantage of the stock retention plate installed on every motherboard. For LGA775 systems, a rear retention plate is required.

This is where it might be handy to have a friend to lend some extra hands. No one really knows how difficult it can be to try and run in a screw whilst holding some bracket in place. I can be done alone, but a helping hand makes this so much easier.

Once the Tempest is installed, it looks pretty sweet. The shine of polished metal really sets off the interior of a case -- and that blue LED fan casts cool light all about. Now, speaking of the fan, I'd like to see how loud, or how quiet it is. Sound testing is important, and especially important for coolers. I have a cooler at home that cools well enough, but sounds like a jet in full throttle rolling down the tarmac. Finding quiet coolers is somewhat of a calling for me. 

It's time to turn to our trusted Omega HHSL1 sound meter. With this we can pickup the even the slightest sound. We begin by finding some location, some room, some place with an incredibly low ambient sound level. Then, we use a jumpered power supply to run the fan. As an added note, the power supply I use for sound testing is a perfect zero dBA power supply. This was a custom mod that consisted of -- you guessed it -- tearing out the fan. It will get a little warm sometimes, but I never run it for more than thirty seconds or so. As for the cooler, I will usually suspend them from a ceiling hook with a bit of string, mechanics wire or something like that. I've found that resting a fan or cooler onto the table top can increase the level of noise, as the hard surface picks up on the vibrations, and begins vibrating itself. Suspending the cooler and or fan eliminates these vibrations. Once everything is set up and the cooler fan is running, I take the measurements from two different ranges, those being 10 centimeters and 1 meter.  I'm also care to keep the microphone pickup of the sound meter out of the exhaust flow of the fan. That wind could introduce false noise, and we don't want that. Let's take a look at what we heard, or perhaps what we didn't hear.

To be honest, sound levels are almost entirely subjective. What may not bother some may irritate others. Based upon our sound measurements, I think we can take that stock Intel cooler and give it a proper burial, and the thermal testing figures will likely agree. I wasn't too suprised to see the Nautilus 500 lose. I know, everyone and their dog says water cooling is quiet. It can be, but in the case of our Nautilus 500, it isn't. The little impeller than drives the cooling fluid can makes tons of noise. This could potentially get worse as it wears with age. It would appear that the OCZ Tempest is somewhat in the midrange when it comes to cooler noise, and that's a good thing. 

As for the thermal tests themselves, we gathered up a bunch of parts and got to work. Here's a list of what we tossed together, including the Pentium D 840 space heater.

Intel Pentium D 840 processor
ASUS P5WD2-E Premium board
Corsair DDR2 PC2-8500 memory (2 * 1 GB)
Single XFX GeForce 7800 GT graphics card
Seagate Baracuda 7200.9 80GB SATA hard drive
Samsung SM-332 CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive
NVIDIA ForceWare 91.31 graphics drivers
Windows XP Professional SP2

Now that we have all of that hardware, it's time to assemble it. The first thing we want to do is clean both the top of the processor, and the base of the heat sink.

We use Arctic Silver Thermal Compound Remover first, just to get rid of any excess thermal paste that might be sticking about. After that, a quick wipe with Arctic Silver's Thermal Surface Purifier. This helps to remove any oils or residues that may have been left behind. Finaly, a small dab of Arctic Silver Lumière Thermal Testing Compound is applied.

And what thermal test wouldn't be complete without some competition. We lined up a good spectrum of cooling solutions. These range from water cooling, to stock, to high end. From left to right we have...

Corsair Nautlus 500
Thermalright Ultra 120
Noctua NH-U 12
OCZ Tempest
Intel Stock

So how do we test test our coolers? We use CPU Burn-in to load up a chip. In the case of our D 840, we run two instances of CPU Burn-in to tax both cores, and disable error checking to generate as much heat as possible. We hooked the coolers up to the CPU fan header on the motherboard. Usually, we would use an external fan speed controller to dial in low and high speed, but this cooler is one that most every user wouldn't bother to control. Most motherboards now have the capability to auto-adjust the fan speed based on some user-specific temperature threshold, so the possibility for control is still there if the user wants it.

It looks like the Tempest did the bare minimum right, and didn't come close to beating the kings of cooling at Neo Lab: the Noctua, Nautilus 500, and Thermalright Ultra 120. All of these coolers stomped the Tempest, but they all have the advantage of sheer size/complexity. Fortunately, the Tempest held its own and thoroughly trounced the Intel stock cooler at idle and load.

The Tempest is a decent performer, but it is definitely not in the same league that we are used to testing. At best, it is only 9C cooler than the Intel stock cooler on a Pentium D 840 under load, but it does look good installed.

So what kind of conclusions can we draw from everything here? Read on.