TherMagic CPU Cooling System (CCS) Review

Testing

The tests performed on this cooler will follow my standard guidelines for determining cooling performance on a heatsink. This will consist of measuring the temperature at idle, after a grueling Quake III Deathmatch, and finally after a looping run of the 3DMark2001 Demo. Once these results have been tallied, I'll boost the FSB to 145MHz and run the tests again. While not an aggressive overclock, it will serve to show how well this cooler does under both normal and overclocked conditions.

Ambient air temperature is a stable 21C throughout tests and voltages are set at 1.8v for the processor and 2.6v for the memory. Also of note is the fact that the system was allowed to run at idle for one hour before any tests were conducted. Evergreen states that it can take up to 45 minutes for the temperatures to stabilize, so I'll give this cooler the best chance possible to provide optimal results.

But before we start looking at the results, it might be a good idea to see what the test bed system consists of. I'll still use the Arctic Silver compound so that test results will have an even baseline to begin from. All other units compared used AS3 so I'll continue the trend.

Xoxide modified Lian-Li PC60 Case

EPoX 8K9A2 Motherboard

AMD Athlon XP 1800+ Processor

512MB Crucial PC2700 DDR Memory

nVidia Reference Ti4200

Seagate Barracuda 40GB Hard Drive

Arctic Silver III

Temperature - Idle

While the results are not the worst I have seen, they are certainly higher than I would have expected for a liquid cooled system. Even the mid-range air coolers are delivering better performance.

Temperature - Quake III

After a bit of fragging, I still ended up with similar results. This isn't what I had expected at all.

Temperature - 3DMark2001 Demo Loop

Again the results are less than stellar. Since I'm not a water aficionado, I can only hazard a guess as to the cause. Since most water-cooled systems make use of a storage reservoir, the liquid used to cool the system doesn't have to make an immediate return to duty. It can run through the radiator, cool off, and then sit for a moment to cool off even more. The CCS tested today has a very limited amount of liquid being used so it is likely that the water just can't get cooled down enough before being recirculated.