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Installation

The instructions from Chill Vent could use a bit of work. The hand drawing sheet of the product was a bit hard to make out as well as the instructions. The instructions were a bit on the non-intuitive side especially when referring to the attachment of brackets. The online instructions can be found here and it illustrates the installation process much better. The included instructions are basically the first text-only page of the online instructions. Be sure to take a look at the pictures and how it fits on.

The installation of the Chill Vent went very smoothly. Snap on or remove the appropriate plastic pieces and attach it to the powersupply if needed and bam, done. The Chill Vent fits snugly enough around the P4 cooler that the mounting brackets were not actually necessary. In our case we removed the bottom section since our venting was in the middle of the case instead of the bottom. The Chill Vent sat on the P4 Cooler and away we went. Installation can get trickier however though as the Chill Vent may require trimming depending on the case used. There are several perforations on the Chill Vent plastic.

Testing / Performance

Intel i875PBZ
Intel P4 3.2 Northwood
Corsair 2 x 256
Gainward GeForce FX5950
Western Digital JB1200 HD
Thermaltake Xaser III Skull
Stock Intel Cooler / Dynatron D61 P4 Cooler

We tested the Chill Vent in several configurations. Two separate coolers, and several configurations with no case fans on, with case fans on, with the 80mm Chill Vent fan, and without the 80mm fan. Tests were done in a closed Thermaltake Xaser III Skull case. Prime95 was allowed to run for a minimum of 45 minutes to ensure maximum heat.

First off the bad news. With the Dynatron we had no improvement with the temperature with any configuration. Processor temperature was at 66 C under load. Our hypothesis behind this lack of results is the higher fan speed of the Dynatron as well as the lower profile of the heatsink which may have hindered the fit of the Chill Vent. The airflow to the heatsink fins is also poor as a large area is occluded by the metal casing that the fan mounts to. In recent cooler test, the Dynatron was the worst performing CPU cooler in our round up falling behind both the stock HSF as well as the Gigabyte 3D Cooler.

Scores improved dramatically with the stock P4 Heatsink in nearly all cases. In both cases with the 80mm fan, temperatures dropped by 4 C. Without the 80mm fan the Chill Vent loses a lot of its performance as we only got a 1 C drop in one configuration and a significant temperature rise in the other. The case vents on the Skull are not particularly large. We ended up removing the side fan on the Skull's swingarm. The fan beside the processor and the one mounted at the front of the drive bays were turned on in the configurations indicated above. In the one instance of the Chill Vent with no fan with the case fans on, the Chill Vent without the fan was occluding the case fan located right beside the processor. In hindsight it would have been better to remove the top piece of the Chill Vent in that particular setup instead of forcing it to draw air through the vent in the middle.