Date: February 17th, 2010
Article by: Joe Anderson (Hardware Reviewer)
Edited By: Nathan Glentworth (Owner / Head Editor)
Product was submitted by: Gelid
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PRODUCT PICTORIAL AND WALKTHROUGH
The mounting solutions look relatively straightforward, but here are separate backplates for each supported Intel socket. AMD users only have to deal with a two-piece mount. As mentioned above, the fan is PWM controlled and will push up to 58 CFM. Let's get the Tranquillo installed and see how it does.
PRODUCT INSTALLATION AND TESTING
Our testbed for this review consists of the following hardware:
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Intel Q6600 Kentsfield Core2Quad CPU (active)
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Western Digital WD800 hard drive
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Western Digital WD6400 hard drive
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Samsung SH-S203N DVD writer
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Buffalo Firestix DDR2 RAM (2 X 1GB)
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EVGA 8800 GTS 320MB graphics card
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Thermaltake Toughpower 750W PSU
All coolers were tested in the open case pictured above. Keep in mind that temps inside your case will be different, depending on the chassis and airflow.
With the Tranquillo installed, there's plenty of room around the socket on this board, but if you're wondering about fitment on your particular mobo…
…Gelid has a dimensional drawing to help you determine if you'll have any fitment issues. It's a tower cooler and relatively tall, but should fit into most all mid- and full-tower cases. With the Tranquillo installed, we can do some testing.
The following parameters were used throughout testing:
• Arctic Silver 5 TIM used on all coolers.
• Ambient temperature kept at a constant 21C.
• Idle temperatures were recorded after one hour of zero load after booting to the desktop.
• Load temperatures were recorded after one hour of maximum CPU heat testing using OCCT 2.0.
• Core temperatures were logged with OCCT.
• Fan speeds were recorded using SpeedFan (BIOS fan speed control disabled.)
• For the processor, idle and load temperatures were recorded at stock CPU speed (2.4 GHz.) and at a 33% overclock (3.2 GHz.). Vcore was raised by 0.15V during the overclocking runs.
The computer was shut down for a minimum of one hour between tests. During cooling test runs, the rear fan in the test case was shut off.
