Cooler Master HAC-V81 "XDream" HSF Review

Testing

Now for what we've been waiting for, cold hard numbers. 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.

But before we start looking at the results, it might be a good idea to see what the test bed system consists of…

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

Not too shabby so far. We're only about 1.5-2 degrees off the Swiftech monster, but we've only been sitting here idle so far. Lets crank up the heat just a bit now.

Temperature - Quake III Arena

We're still knocking in results that sit just 1.5 degrees off the MCX462+ cooler. This isn't turning out just too badly so far.

Temperature - 3DMark2001 Demo Loop

Another test and another result tally of 1.5 degrees higher than the MCX cooler...again. Though the XDream won't break any records, it is managing to provide us with some very solid results in the cooling department. The consistent results also say that the fan attached to this HSF is working at a very stable pace. Whether running default speeds or overclocked, the cooler is performing its assigned function admirably.