Test system

Before going to actual tests I have to tell you that you should not compare our test results with the temperature showed by your motherboard monitor. We invested a lot of time in making these results as accurate as possible, but the main objective of this round up is the comparison. The difference between our measurement method and the one displayed by an Omega sensor installed on a Taisol using the AMD method was at most 2.7degrees Celsius, so I think that the results are in an acceptable accuracy interval.

This roundup is targeted mainly to AMD CPUs, the reason why we tested the cooling power with a 1.2Ghz Thunderbird overclocked to 1.33Ghz 1.85V core. This CPU is loaded with more than 75W, so most coolers were stressed by these conditions.
Due to users request this time we compared all the heatsinks, not on the market target like in the previous article, but we suggested the target market for every cooler. Take a look below to our test bed:

As you can see we didn't use an out of ordinary system. Passmark BurnIn Test was considered able to stress the system with no other help. In the preliminary test sessions we ran several tests and we discovered that BurnIn Test 2.2 is really a very powerful test for measuring system stability. The ambient temperature was measured by an Omega sensor placed at about 30cm distance away from the cooler not to be influenced by the cooler airflow.

The noise was measured at 30cm also. You will find that the fan specs talk about a much lower noise than the results of our tests. There are multiple reasons for this. Most manufacturers measure the noise 1m away from the cooler, with no heatsink. When a heatsink is used the noise level is bigger. In the specifications table you can find the noise level rated by the manufacturer of the fan and in the test results our results.