Arctic Cooling Alpine 64 Pro CPU Cooler Review
How We Tested
Contents
In order to test this AMD CPU cooler we adopt the following methodology.
We picked the AMD processor with the highest TDP (Thermal Design Power) we had available, a Phenom X4 9650 (95 W).
We took noise and temperature measurements with the CPU idle and under full load. In order to achieve 100% CPU load on the four processing cores we ran Prime95 on the "In-place Large FFTs" option and three instances of StressCPU program, all at the same time.
We compared the tested cooler to the AMD stock cooler (that came with the CPU we used) and to one high-performance cooler.
Temperature measurements were taken with a digital thermometer, with the sensor touching the base of the cooler, and also with the core temperature reading (given by the CPU thermal sensor) from the from the SpeedFan program, using an arithmetic average of the four core temperature readings.
The sound pressure level (SPL) was measured with a digital noise meter, with its sensor placed 4" (10 cm) from the fan. We turned off the video board cooler so it wouldn’t interfere with the results, but this measurement is only for comparative purposes, because a precise SPL measurement needs to be made inside an acoustically insulated room with no other noise sources, which is not the case here.
Hardware configuration
- Processor: Phenom X4 9650
- Motherboard: Gigabyte M61PME-S2P
- Memory: 2 GB Corsair XMS2 DHX TWIN2X2048-6400C4DHX G (DDR2-800/PC2-6400 with 4-4-4-12 timings), working at 800 MHz
- Hard disk: Maxtor DiamondMax 22 500 GB (STM3500320AS, SATA-300, 7.200 rpm, 32 MB buffer)
- Video card: On-board.
- Video resolution: 1680×1050
- Video monitor: Samsung Syncmaster 2232BW Plus
- Power supply required: Seventeam ST-350BKV
- Case: 3R System L-1
100 T.REX Cool
Software Configuration
- Windows XP Professional SP3 installed on an NTFS partition
Software Used
Error Margin
We adopted a 2 °C error margin, i.e., temperature differences below 2 °C are considered irrelevant.