Prolong the life of your processor

A good quality CPU Cooler can relieve excessive heat stress

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By tech.co.uk staff

July 22nd 2007 | Tell us what you think [ 0 comments ]

Large fans produce less noise but they should be designed to fit the heatsink

A well-designed passive CPU cooler can be a thing of beauty, but it must also perform the job at hand well

Perpex windows in PCs, cold cathode lights, and the drastic drop in the price of blue LEDs. We have all of these things to thank for the rather extreme rise in the processor cooler range over the past few years.

The humble cooler isn't just a practical thing any more. No. It's the visible beating heart of your machine, the tower of metal whose size should be in theoretical proportion to the data your processor is churning. We can only conclude, after seeing a large amount of what's on offer, that most people who intend to show off their PC are just a little bit odd.

Take Apack's Zerotherm BTF90 . There's no question about its purpose, and no question about the fact that it cools a CPU perfectly well. We ended up with a full load temperature of around 49ºC, which is perfectly acceptable. But it's shaped like a butterfly.

Why? Is this for all those nature-obsessed loonies who ran out and bought Lian-Li's 'Anniversary' case, a preposterous 3ft monstrosity shaped like a conch shell? Is it for those who are unwisely attempting to breed beautiful Lepidoptera inside their PC's case? Nope.

We can assume it's solely for the light hearted case modder, the one that somehow isn't obsessed with turning his PC into a grungy mess, but that would give Apack a market of approximately five people. Again, no.

The most likely answer is that Apack needed a whole lot of aluminium fins for its cooler, and the butterfly shape was easy to cut and produced less waste. The world becomes a lot less amusing if you treat it logically. We are still a confused bunch of PC owners, though.

The end of passive cooling?

Perhaps in the future when there are fewer veterans of the early days, we'll be less attached to concepts we feel should still work perfectly, like passive cooling. Passive cooling is, as is proven by the woeful BTF95, dead on its feet.

The concept has been obliterated by technology. Even though processors are consistently getting smaller and faster - and even cooler, in some cases - they never reach a temperature where their heat can safely be dispersed by nothing more than a large radiator.

Generally, only the lowest powered PC processors from the likes of VIA and some of Intel's new low-power range can get away with passive cooling. But even then you'll be lucky if your portable computing device doesn't get alarmingly hot.

If you've ever come into contact with a Hush case (a case which acts as a CPU cooler, using heatsink-esque fins surrounding its edges) you'll realise just what sort of surface area a passive cooler needs; even though it's covered in fins, the Hush case radiates some serious warmth.

Furthermore, it appears that not all coolers are designed with users in mind. OK, most typical users will probably only need to fit them once, but several coolers - Scythe's 'Andy Samurai Master', and CoolerMaster's GeminII for instance - go a little overboard in terms of sheer metal content.

The GeminII certainly gets a good rating in terms of sound; its incorporation of 120mm fans means a near-silent airfl ow. But it's absurdly big, and it's been clear for a long time that 120mm fans are too unwieldy to be the answer to processor cooling.

The Samurai Master has an absolutely enormous block, which spreads over a wide area; and unlike Cooler Master's GeminII, little consideration seems to have been made for the installer's screwdriver, particularly when fitting it to an LGA 775 socket.

And for all that mass, the Samurai Master isn't even that outstanding in cooling terms, squeaking out 54 degrees under load. Which takes us nicely back to the realisation that good design is indeed the most important aspect of a fan cooler.

But forget dreams of an ultra-huge metal structure, forget your dreams of silence. Such concepts start with an idea and attempt to build the necessary technology around it. This is incorrect.

It is the core technologies that need changing. Experimentation in blue-LED design should take second place to experimentation with raw concept.

As our tests have shown, Asus' Silent Square Pro - which does nothing more than place its fan right in the middle of the heatsink - is a clear leader in terms of actual cooling, and just about the only example here which tries anything that isn't a simple cosmetic change. Words: Alex Cox