SUMMARY: The name Dr. Thermal has been cropping up lately in a lot of places. This newcomer has a different design that they use for their heatsinks, and some very innovative features. But the main question is still "Can it cool?" Come join Mike "Darthtanion" Wright as he checks into the Dr. Thermal TI-V86N HSF and finds out if it has what it takes to handle the big-boys.
I recently upgraded my test system, so am basically starting over as far as test results. While it does limit the comparison capabilities, it should give us a new baseline to work from when testing future HSF units. So let’s take a look at the test system:
Antec SX1030 Tower Case w/ 170-CFM airflow EPoX 8KHA+ Motherboard AMD Thunderbird 1000MHz Processor @ 1400MHz (AVIA) 512MB Crucial PC2100 DDR Memory Prolink XX-Player GeForce3 IBM GXP60 40GB Hard Drive Arctic Silver II
The core voltage of the processor is set to 1.8v, and memory is set to 2.6v. Ambient air temperature was sitting at 21C and didn’t fluctuate during testing. Processor speed was firmly at 1400MHz, which puts out about 76.8 watts of heat.
Testing will consist of measuring the temperatures at idle, after a Quake III Arena Deathmatch, and after a continuous looping of the 3dMark2001 Demo. These are the main types of stresses that today’s systems face, so we’ll concentrate on them.
After having the Gladiator as my best performing cooler for so long, it seems that it has taken a back seat to yet another competitor. The Thermal Integration heatsink performed very well. Even taking into consideration the fact that the core isn’t fully sitting on top of the copper core, the TI-V86N performed admirably. This seems to bode very well for the performance of this HSF.
