Testing

Well, we have dissected the cooler and made reference to the fact that it is very quiet, but how does it perform? After all, quiet is nice but not at the expense of a system running critically hot. To answer this question, I will put the Kamakaze through our standard heatsink testing gauntlet so that we can try to figure out if this thing is for real or not.

Testing conditions will follow my standard guidelines concerning coolers. Ambient temperature is kept at a regulated 21C and the cooling system will be tested in a closed case. Before I jump into system conditions we'll take a look at the test setup.

Xoxide modified Lian-Li PC60 Case (provided by Xoxide)

Soltek SL-75MRN-L Motherboard (provided by Soltek)

AMD Athlon XP 1800+ Processor

1024MB Crucial PC2700 DDR Memory

Sapphire Radeon 9700 Pro "Ultimate Edition" (provided by Sapphire)

Western Digital 80GB Hard Drive

Arctic Silver III

I am using an older based Palomino processor since they tend to put out a bit more heat. And after all, we want to see how it handles this very thing so it suits for testing purposes. The processor voltage was set to 1.8v and memory was set to 2.6v. Temperatures are measured at idle after 15 minutes of no activity, measured again after a rugged Quake III Arena Deathmatch, and a final time after a continuous demo looping of 3DMark2001. After these temperatures have been recorded, we'll boost the FSB to 145MHz and run it through the same series of tests. The moderate overclock of only the FSB will allow the processor to do the work and not share the load across the entire system. We're after heat and we will get it.

A final note: Each category will have two screenshots of the temperature results. The top set of results will be at default speeds (1533MHz and 69.8 watts) and the bottom results will be at the overclocked speeds (1668MHz and 73.8 watts). The results should speak for themselves, but I wanted to make sure there wasn't any confusion here.

Results - Idle

At idle speeds we see that while not at the top of the food chain, the Kamakaze is seated in the middle of a group of worthy contenders. And remember, this cooler is far quieter than any other sink used in our comparison. But lets move on to a little stress in the life of this cooler. Can it still maintain itself in a respectable manner when we add some stress to the mix?

Results - Quake III Arena Deathmatch

Again we see that whether we're running at default speeds or overclocked speeds, the cooler can still maintain a very workable temperature. So far so good.

Results - 3DMark2001 Demo Loop

I must say that I'm impressed here. The results in all tests are very impressive considering the low noise levels that this HSF puts out. Very nice!