Silverstone Cooler: Nitrogen NT03
How we tested
For my testing I setup a system in an Antec P180b.
This comprised of:
AMD 3200+ Venice (Stock 2000Mhz)
Abit AT8 32x 93 Motherboard
1gb (2 x 512mb) OCZ Platinum Rev 2
Gainward Bliss 7300GT
Hitachi Deskstar 160gb SATA drive
Sony DVD-ROM/CD-RW
Silverstone Strider 560w
OS: Windows XP Professional
For the testing I had the Venice clocked both at stock settings of 200 x 10 (2GHz) and 250 x 10 (2.5GHz). For the stock clocks the Abit board gives the CPU 1.4v. To get the CPU to run at 2.5GHz it needed 1.55v.
Temperatures were logged using Abit’s uGuru monitoring software. Temperatures were checked with a thermal probe and found to be fairly accurate.
For idle temperatures I left the PC for 15mins then recorded the idle temperature every 10 seconds for 5 minutes, making sure I did not use any program that was not already running at windows startup.
For the load temperatures I ran an instance of prime 95 with in-place large FFT’s for maximum heat and power consumption, as well as an instance of [email protected] set to take up any spare cycles of the CPU. Once again I left this for 15mins then recorded the temperatures over a 5 minute period.
For a comparison I used AMD’s excellent Heatpipe cooler that comes with their top-spec 939 CPU’s. This is a very good heatpipe cooler that uses an 80mm fan. Although this is not a like-for-like comparison; it gives an idea for comparison and gives the results a reference.
