OCZ Heatsink Round-Up

Group

The OCZ coolers in all their glory.

While these heatsinks are obviously designed with the flaming hot AMD K7 core CPUs in mind, I tested them on a Pentium III 500 @ 750, 1.7V, in an Iwill slocket II configuration, which allowed me to me assure core temperatures via the accurate internal diode. It should be noted that I needed to move the two Delta 38CFM fans one half inch to the side on the OCZ Twin Turbo in order to test them in this slocket configuration. Moving the fans may have had a slight effect on performance, maybe for the better, maybe for the worse.

Twin

Notice how little I moved the fans, I moved them as little as possible.

I like to let the numbers do the talking – so here is a table of the results:

Heatsink

Idle Temp

Load Temp

OCZ Twin Turbo

24

27

OCZ Twin Turbo w/ Delta38s @7V

26

29

OCZ Quad Cool

27

30

OCZ Monster II

29

31

Intel Retail 1GHz Cooler

32

38

I threw in the Retail Intel 1GHz heatsink as a reference point. I managed to maintain an ambient temperature of 22C throughout the testing period.

Some users my find these heatsinks to be distracting – myself included. So I decided to see how the Twin Turbo performed with the two Deltas running at 7V. I was pleased to discover the Twin Turbo, with the fans running on 7V, outperformed the Quad Cooler. The Twin Turbo was also much quieter when running the fans at 7V. If you are easily distracted by loud fans, I highly recommend buying the Twin Turbo and running the fans on 7V, as this gives great cooling for the noise level.

I was not entirely pleased with the machining quality of the OCZ heatsinks. The heatsinks are made from extruded bar-stock You can see were OCZ cut the bar-stock in to heatsink sized sections using a bandsaw (a mechanical “hacksaw”). But It doesn’t need to look pretty, it only needs to keep the cpu cool, and it does a damn fine job of it. The bottom of the heatsinks were rougher than most, lapping would further improve their cooling ability.

Bottom

As you can see from the photo, the OCZ coolers could benefit from lapping.

Well, there you have it; short, simple and to the point. I want to thank OCZ for letting us have an up-close look at their Monster II cooler and its variants. I also want to thank the Overclockers.com guys for allowing me to do this product review. It was a real treat 🙂

Jeff Evans (Forum Senior Member)

Jeff is part of a new website HERE. Check it out.


Be the first to comment

Leave a Reply