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Installation

Installation was straight forward after browsing through the manual. Novice and experienced users are advised to take a look as this is not your typical heatsink. As advertised, installation is truly "tooless" and did not require the use of a screwdriver as advertised. The thumb clip was much better positioned than in the recently reviewed Aerocool and was very easy to work with. For the heatsink to be fully functional, 3 wires need to be attached. A power cable with a floppy connector gets hooked up to the heatsink while the other end goes to a free molex connector; the header into the motherboard should be attached so you can monitor the RPM of the fan, and lastly in order to control the fan speed, it must be hooked up to the fan speed controller.

Testing

We pit the PCU21-VG against our perennial office favorite: the Thermaltake Silent Boost. Due to equipment problems we have switched from our usual Chaintech Zenith to AOpen's AK79-D as our temperature test bed. A combination of Prime95 and Motherboard Monitor 5 are used to load up the processor and to keep an eye out on the temperature. We forego the usual default clockspeed route and get straight into stressing the heatsink. At stock speeds the temperatures would be fairly close and to be honest a default heatsink would do fine for a stock 1800+. The CPU used in the test is a 1800+ at 200x11 running at a core voltage of 1.65V. The testing was done in the open on our workbench and not inside a closed case.

The temperature did not drop when increasing the fan speed under the load. This is a bit of a concern as the efficiency of the heatsink/fan are not as good as what it could be and should be looked at in future revisions of the unit.

The Dynatron was the coolest of the heatsinks but it comes at a price - your sanity. It is extremely loud and it would be something that I would not consider using on a daily basis, so we include it here only as a high performance reference. The Gigabyte performs well against the Silent Boost especially with load. Idle temperatures are a bit on the higher side though.