Performance

Engineers that design coolers have to be able to make a cooler that's not overly big or heavy, yet with the capability to deal with large amounts of heat. This is harder than it sounds, and many new methods have been tried. Different materials, different shapes and sizes, more powerful fans, and other technologies such as heatpipes are some of the ways to improve a cooler's performance. One thing with CPUs at least, is that they are becoming more energy efficient and cooler running - unlike GPUs.


When I first put the cooler on, I purposely put a larger than needed amount of thermal paste to see how much would be squeezed out. The cooler had good contact, however as I pointed out earlier with the Direct Touch Heatpipes - You can see where the pipes gap between the Aluminum of the base and the next pipe, but the contact between the base of each heatpipe was excellent. These little gaps got filled with TIM, and could possibly cause a slight performance loss.

For the test setup, Prime95 was used to load the CPU, and Windows at the Desktop was used to get the idle temperature. Different clocks/voltage were used to increase the total heat output. The amount of heat output of a processor is measured in watts. All CPUs/GPUs have what's known as a TDP or Thermal Design Point which is given by the manufacturer (different manufacturers measure TDP in different ways). This TDP rating gives a baseline value of how much heat is being dissipated by a CPU when it's at its default state (not overclocked). However to get the heat output of an overclocked CPU, a formula is needed. To calculate this, the formula " TDP * (OC MHz / Stock MHz) * (OC vCore / Stock vCore )² " was used.


The cooler was tested in two modes - High (2200 RPM ±10%), and Low (1000 RPM ±10%). Arctic Silver 5 thermal paste was used and I gave it a day with lots of heating and cooling cycles to break in some for the best performance.


The performance of the iCEAGE is looking very good. It is ahead of all the other coolers by a fairly good margin.


Even at 3 GHz - 158 Watts, the iCEAGE is doing well on high. It's a full 2°C cooler than the Thermaltake SilentWater II at 50°C.

I think more performance could be possible if they could get the base of the cooler more one piece. By this I mean, no groves between each heatpipe and the Aluminum of the base. These little grooves can get air pockets or clumps of thermal paste which could result in a slight performance loss. However, looking at the figures the iCEAGE produced, these little grooves don't seem to be an issue at all.