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Posted by
Per Hansson
on July 13, 2001
Manufactured and Supplied by: CPUfx
There
are a few things you should take note of before you proceed
with the reading. If you read my Leufken
water cooler review a while ago, then you should know
that I’m not using the same processor, the one I had then
was a Duron 700mhz ‘AXCAR’ core, which isn’t exactly
the best breed of the Duron’s available… The one I have
now is a ‘AKCA Z’ and clocks in at 750mhz, this CPU is
considered the best Duron/Spitfire core available to date.
If
all those letter makes no sense to you, take a look at this
article over at Athlonoc.com which explains it very nicely
and also shows you a graph over all known steppings of
CPU’s available.
Also,
you should take note that this water cooler is in a
completely different league than the Leufken setup I tested
before, which costs around $120. This one is more expensive
selling for about $180… but enough with that, let’s see
if it’s worth taking out the big wallet and going with
CPUFX’s water cooler.
The
first impression you get when you receive the kit is that no
money has been spared; everything is top-notch quality from
the manual to the water block.
The radiator
The
radiator has the same size as a 120mm fan. That could sound
like an advantage to some, however something I disliked
about it is that your only choice of fans are limited to a
Sunon 120MM fan (or 2).
Don’t
get me wrong, it cools admirably well but that comes at a
cost too; its rated sound level is 46db, way too high for
me!
If
you can’t stand the noise level the Sunon fan creates,
then do what I did: Go
buy a 120MM Pabst fan, it does push 10cfm less air but the
sound level is only 27db, and if you have done your homework
you know that 3db equals to an increase of 100% in sound,
this means that the Pabst fan is more than 600% less noisy
than the Sunon fan!
Of
course you could also connect a “variable-voltage
regulator” and choose with that, a more appropriate
sound level, with the downside that the fan will push less
air of course, I did this with my Leufken
rig.
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