Performance

The performance of the water cooling kit was tested by running Orthos Prime 2004 "Small FFTs". The test lasted two hours where I had no other program taking up CPU time. The general idea is that after two hours of 100% CPU load the water should have reached its maximum temperature. This type of test was repeated three times with the fans on the radiator set to "Silent", "Normal" and "OC".

The tests were performed both with my CPU running at stock speeds and in an overclocked state. The temperatures were collected with CoreTemp version 0.95 and RivaTuner version 2.02. The room temperature in all of the tests was 20° Celsius.

Specifications for the test rig:

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6420 2133 MHz stock, overclocked to 3200 MHz
• 2 GB CellShock DDR2-1000 RAM @ 4-4-4-12 on 2.3 V
• GIGABYTE P35C-DS3R motherboard
• Inno3D 8800 GTS 320 MB overclocked to 648 MHz core and 2000 MHz RAM (effective)
• Western Digital Raptor 36 GB, Hitachi Deskstar 400 GB
• Case: GIGABYTE 3D Mercury and Antec P182
• Cooling: Scythe Infinity, GIGABYTE 3D Mercury with 3D Galaxy water cooling.

First let's take a look at cooling performance with my Core 2 Duo E6420 running at stock speeds and voltages.


The difference between the two cooling solutions isn't all that big when running the CPU at stock speeds, but the decrease in temperature is noticeable both in terms of idle and load temperature. It's pretty clear that the amount of air flowing over the radiator doesn't matter much with the CPU at stock speeds, in other words the limiting factor isn't the radiator's performance at least not with a moderate heat load.


When increasing the heat load the difference between air cooling and water cooling becomes clearer. It's quite obvious that the 3D Galaxy system is much better at dealing with high heat loads than my Scythe Infinity. Even with the fans at "Silent" the 3D Galaxy outperforms the Infinity by 8° Celsius. The noise level with the Galaxy's fans at "Silent" was really low even compared to my Scythe Infinity with two low noise Yateloon fans. With the fans set to normal the Scythe Infinity and the Galaxy make about the same amount of noise. So from a noise / performance point of view the Galaxy is a better cooling system.

The performance of the 3D Galaxy system is by no means enthusiast level, but it's still substantially better than high-end air coolers.