Tennmax
Detonator Cooler review
Posted
by Adam
Klein on September 02, 1999 - Page 2/3
Company: Tennmax
Product: Detonator
TNT Cooler
The cooler I received was
type B. There are three types of Detonator coolers. Not all
boards are the same, hence the three versions. There is type
0, type A, and type B. Type 0 has a self-adhesive thermal
pad that can be attached to any TNT and TNT2 board.
Type A has plastic pins on the very corners that hold the
cooler tight to the chip. Type B is similar to type A, but
the pins are slightly less on the corners of the heatsink.
You can check
here for the various models.
Now
back to my model, the type B. This cooler is made to fit
perfectly on the Creative Labs TNT2 Ultra board. It
installed easily with just simply pushing in the pins to
hold it in place.
Heat
Temperature Comparison and Overclocking Potential
As
most of you know, the Creative Labs TNT2 Ultra is one of the
hottest boards (both literally and figuratively). The
heatsink and fan combo is not placed well on the chipset due
to the poor quality of the glue and the manner of which it
is applied. This causes the core of the TNT2 to heat
up to high levels.
This can
hinder the overclocking potential. The TNT2 Detonator is a
good choice to use as a replacement for the poor quality of
what Creative is offering as cooling. If Creative were to do
a little research in heat dissipation, I feel that the same
cooler that comes on there by default can be used to it’s
full potential. As it stands now, we can thank TennMax for
bringing to the world the TennMax TNT Detonator.
The
Detonator is a good cooler, but I feel users should be able
to choose between thermal compound and a thermal pad for
contact on the TNT2 casing. The Detonator comes with a
thermal pad on the bottom of the heatsink.
After I
installed the Detonator, I promptly went to my overclocking
utility to see if I could push the card to its limits. With
the standard cooler I could set the Creative Labs TNT2 Ultra
board I have to a core speed of 170MHz. The memory was able
to go to 210MHz without visual distortion, but the cooler on
the core won’t help you very much in getting better speed
from the memory.
With
the TNT Detonator, I was only able to get a core speed of
173MHz. That’s only 3MHz higher than 170MHz. I felt that
this was odd, since I knew I could get more than 3MHz out of
it. I then removed the unit from my Creative Labs board and
carefully scraped the thermal pad off of the heatsink. After
that was done, I took very fine grit sandpaper and smoothed
the surface of the heatsink to remove any cuts caused by
scrapping off the thermal pad.
After
that was done, I put a small layer of thermal grease on the
TNT2 core casing and pushed the TennMax Detonator against it
to make sure an optimal connection between the heatsink and
the TNT2 was established. I then pushed the pins back in and
placed the Creative Labs board back in my system. I was
surprised to see that this combination worked very well. I
was able to get the core of the TNT2 up to 176MHz. This is
6MHz from the 170MHz I had with Creative Labs default unit
and 3MHz higher than with the thermal pad.
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