Premium Socket 939 Heatsink Round-Up

Reviews: Cooling

Author:
Editor:
Sponsor:
Published:

Max Slowik
Kurtis
Sharka Corp
Aug. 29, 2006

Specifications

<< Previous

Next >>

The Heatsinks

I have tested seven of the highest-rated Socket 939 heatsinks against each other to find out which perform the best under a multitude of conditions.

The coolers are, in order of testing:

Zalman CNPS9500
Zalman CNPS9500AM2
Scythe Ninja Plus+
Scythe Mine
Noctua NH-U12
Thermaltake Sonic Tower
Thermaltake Mini Typhoon

Testing Methodology

All heatsinks were tested in a Cooler Master Centurion 5, outfitted with 2 Yate Loon 120mm and 2 Masscool 80mm fans, on an MSI K8n Neo-4 SLI Platinum motherboard, with an AMD Athlon64 3200+, 2x1gb sticks of DDR500 Mushkin memory, with an eVGA 7800GT OC video card.

Each heatsink was tested in the following conditions:

Ambient room temperature between 20-23 degrees Celsius.
Intake/exhaust fans at full speed to simulate an extreme performance system.
Intake/exhaust fans modified to run as silently as possible.
Arctic Silver 5 thermal interface material was used, which was made to cure with a day of burn-in.
Athlon 64 3200+ was overclocked to 2.4GHz at 1.525v.

For full load, maximum heat production and stability testing, Prime95 was run for an hour.

Some of these heatsinks require you to buy a 120mm fan separately. For the sake of consistency, I stress tested each heatsink with the fan bundled with the Plus model Scythe Ninja. This is a low-airflow fan designed to operate silently. Any of the heatsinks that can use standard 120mm fans will perform better with a higher-airflow fan.

At stock, a Winchester CPU produces 89 heat watts under a full load. It has been overclocked from 2GHz at 1.35v to 2.4GHz at 1.525v. With these settings, under a full load, the heatsink must dissipate a total of 136 watts of heat, according to AMD's white papers.

Here's the formula to calculate the change in thermal output, for your information:
Overclocked TDP = TDP X ( OC MHz / Stock MHz ) X ( OC Vcore / Stock Vcore )^2

<< Previous

Page 3 of 12

Next >>

Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: An Overclocking Primer
Page 3: The Contenders & Testing Methodology
Page 4: Zalman CNPS9500
Page 5: Zalman CNPS9500AM2
Page 6: Scythe Ninja Plus+
Page 7: Scythe Mine
Page 8: Noctua NH-U12
Page 9: Thermaltake Sonic Tower
Page 10: Thermaltake Mini Typhoon
Page 11: Overclocking & Temperatures
Page 12: Conclusions & Final Recommendations

Subscribe to CPU [more info]

View All

Related Reviews

AeroCool HT-101 CPU Cooler

CPU January 25, 2005

Thermaltake Fanless103 Heatpipe CPU Cooler

CPU January 5, 2005

Zalman CNPS7000B-Cu 92mm CPU Cooler

CPU December 29, 2004

Zalman CNPS7700-Cu 120mm CPU Cooler

CPU December 27, 2004

Add Comment

0 User Comments

Add Comment

To add a comment without being a member, you may omit the password field, but you must enter your name (or nickname) along with your comment. * Denotes required fields.