Cooling at Stock Speed - Self-Contained Water Coolers: Xigmatek AIO vs. Evercool Silver Knight
Some users will never overclock their CPU, but they still want to run the coolest CPU temperatures possible to enhance stability and extend CPU life. We tested the Xigmatek AIO and Evercool Silver Knight coolers with the supplied fans.
Where the Intel stock cooler keeps the X6800 at 41C at idle, the Xigmatek manages 31C and the Evercool 34C. Both results are a significant improvement over the Intel stock cooler performance, but the results are average at best among the coolers tested at AnandTech. The Thermalright coolers, at the top of our heatpipe tower performance charts, cool to 26C and 27C, and the Tuniq 120 maintains 27C.
It is more difficult to effectively simulate a computer being stressed by all of the conditions it might be exposed to in different operating environments. For most home users CPU power is most taxed with contemporary gaming. Therefore our stress test simulates playing a demanding game.
The Far Cry River demo is looped for 30 minutes and the CPU temperature is captured at 4 second intervals with the NVIDIA Monitor "logging" option. The highest temperature during the load test is then reported. Momentary spikes are ignored, as we report a sustained high-level temp that you would expect to find in this recording configuration. This test configuration roughly equates to an 80% CPU load test using Intel TAT.
Cooling efficiency of the Xigmatek AIO and Evercool Silver Knight are compared under load conditions at stock speed to the retail HSF and other recently tested CPU coolers.
The stock load test results are very interesting, not so much from a performance standpoint as in revealing how the two self-contained water coolers operate. The Xigmatek, best at idle, goes to 52C at load, indicating the auto fan has not kicked into higher RPM mode at this temperature. The Silver Knight manages 44C, because the fan is already on high. Neither cooler is a stellar performer at stock load, which is frankly a surprise. The 52C and 44C load temps compare to the Thermalrights at 32C and 33C, the Tuniq at 34C and the Cooler Master Hyper 6+ and Zalman 9700 at 36C. Stock load performance is below average among tested coolers.
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