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Introduction

Modern day CPUs are capable of producing more heat than my toaster. Because of this, CPU coolers are necessary to prevent your $300 CPU from frying like the eggs I had for breakfast this morning (no, my eggs aren’t hard boiled). Without proper cooling, a CPU could easily burn out in less than ten seconds.

We will look at several coolers for the Intel Pentium 4 processor of the 478-pin variety. Unlike AMD, which has the option of OEM processors for all models, almost all P4’s are sold in the retail box. So, there are no shortages of the stock Intel P4 cooler. The general consumers will not go out of their way to purchase an aftermarket CPU cooler. For the hardcore computer user, especially overclockers, anything “stock” just will not do. Performance and tweaking is everything to these special computer users and heat stands in the way of reaching the goal of the ultimate speed machine.

With that said, each cooler will be compared with the stock Intel cooler because any cooler that might give that extra performance increase over the stock one is a good cooler.

Testing

For uniformity, I use the same thermal compound for testing each of the coolers and NOT the compounds included with any of the CPU coolers (if any). This will be the Arctic Silver III. I will also use the Motherboard Monitor 5 to get the temperature readings.

I let the computer run for five minutes without activity to get an accurate 0% idle CPU temperature. As for loading temperature, I will use SiSoft Sandra’s Burn-In Wizard running the CPU Arithmetic Benchmark and the CPU Multi-Media Benchmark looped five times to get the load temperature. The ambient temperature is 22.2°C.

I’m a callin’ ya out fer a SHOOTOUT!! (The competition)

• Intel Pentium 4 478-pin boxed cooler
• AOpen AC715e
• Titan TTC-MT4 Majesty
• Titan TTC-W2T
• AVC 117140 Sunflower
• Speeze 9T207B1H3G IceStream

The Saloon (Test System)

Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz 478pin
Abit TH7II – RAID
512M Samsung RDRAM
Maxtor 7200rpm ATA133 40Gb
Windows Me
Motherboard Monitor 5

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