Date: October 15th, 2007
Article by: Karl Van der Walt (Hardware Reviewer)
Edited by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner / Head Editor)
Product was submitted by:
<--CLICK FOR DEALS ON A CHIPSET COOLER IN THE UNITED STATES
<--CLICK FOR DEALS ON A CHIPSET COOLER IN CANADA
PRODUCT INSTALLATION & TESTING
The setup and installation is very simple and easy to follow so I'll not bore you with excessive descriptions.
The installation procedure is identical for both coolers so I'll just give a quick walkthrough using the AS-N2000. Removing the screws on the underside of the cooler will allow you to install the mounting brackets in the slots I pointed out earlier.
The provided protective pad usually gets stuck to the northbridge itself, provided your northbridge has an exposed core, if not then the pad should not be used. In this case however I opted to stick it to the cooler itself for ease of installation and uninstallation, it works the same either way.
Naturally you will be required to remove the motherboard from the case in order to remove the original heatsink but this is the case with most, if not all, coolers of this type. Be sure you clean off the existing thermal compound with isopropyl alcohol or the like before applying the provided thermal paste and installing the cooler. You may have to remove your CPU cooler as well to facilitate installation. I have not taken pictures of these steps, as they are self explanatory and identical for all installations of this nature.
With everything installed you can now fit the motherboard back in your case and get ready to test-drive your new cooler. You will notice that there is very little clearance between the northbridge cooler and the CPU cooler, this is a common problem in most, if not all, northbridge coolers of this type and is unavoidable without compromising cooling performance. A benefit in this specific case is that the CPU fan will be drawing air through the northbridge cooler hence improving performance.
Testing
Both products were tested in the following system against the stock aluminum heatsink that came with the motherboard:
CPU - Intel Pentium D 805 socket 775 (stock)
CPU Cooler - Antazone AS-C1000
Motherboard - ASUS P5N-E SLI
RAM - 1gb PQI DDR2 533
GFX - 256mb ASUS EN8600GT
HDD1 - 200gb SATA Seagate Barracuda
HDD2 - 60gb Maxtor IDE
Optical - Aopen +/- DVD/RW
PSU - Nexus NX 8060 600W modular silent PSU
Case - Generic no name windowed case with all fans removed
The testing process consisted of 1 hour of 3DMark 06 looped CPU testing followed by an hour of cool-down before idle temperatures were taken.
The results speak for themselves, both of these coolers perform extremely well when compared to the stock cooler. With over 8c difference in both idle and load temps I seriously can't think of a reason not to recommend these coolers. The performance of both coolers is close enough to be considered identical so in the end it's just a question of what you are looking for aesthetically. Antazone really have a pair of good products here.
