Date: November 24th, 2008
Article by: Joe Anderson (Hardware Reviewer)
Edited by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner / Head Editor)
Product was submitted by: Silverstone
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PRODUCT INSTALLATION AND TESTING
…the Evolution slides down over the screws and is secured with thumbnuts and springs. This is easier said than done, however. The wide span of the Evolution and the proximity of the NorthBridge cooler on my motherboard made getting some of the nuts tightened quite a challenge. Granted, my large, sausage-like fingers didn't help but I think that the mounting system really needs some work. With heatpipes and heatsinks popping up all around the socket areas of modern motherboards, this could be a real problem for some users.
The fan goes on easily after the cooler is installed, or it can be attached to the cooler prior to installation. There's plenty of room around the socket and the surrounding components should benefit from airflow generated under the Evolution by the cooling fan.
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.
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.)
• 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 0.05V (from 1.28 to 1.33V) during the overclocking runs.
The computer was shut down for a minimum of one hour between tests. Here are the results.
As you can see, the Evolution is a much better cooler than the OEM unit, and it's much quieter (at 900 RPM) as well. At 2400 RPM, the cooling is much improved, but the fan is incredibly loud. The Evolution falls a bit behind some of the best performing coolers in the comparison, but the performance is really quite good. Of course, a different fan will likely yield some different numbers, but this test gives a good preview of what to expect.
