Performance

The system being used to test the heatsink is as follows:
The motherboard fan speed control (ASUS Q-fan Control) was disabled in the BIOS, and the fan was run at full speed. Ambient temperature was kept to 22° Celsius (+/- 1 degree) and was measured by a standard mercury thermometer.


At stock CPU speeds the Revo cools marginally better than the stock Intel heatsink, but only under load. Considering the Revo is not meant to be a performance cooler, but instead a quiet one, performance seems adequate.


However, most of our readers want to know how the heatsinks we review will work on an overclocked system, so the Revo was tested with the CPU overclocked to 3.6 GHz at 1.45V. Again, the Revo does better than the stock Intel heatsink, this time beating it by 4°C.

Fan Noise

To measure fan noise we used an IEC Type 2 sound level meter on the dbA setting. Measuring distance was 10 cm from the heatsink fan hub. The short distance of 10 cm is necessary to get proper readings with very silent fans. All fans were tested outside of the case at 12V supplied by a lab PSU. On fans that come with a fan controller or allow control of fan speed in any other way, "low" and "high" indicate the settings on the fan controller. For fans that use a PWM style connector, "Full Speed" is with the fan connected to the lab power supply; "PWM Mode" is with the fan installed in the system without any case fans running, no optical drives connected and with a passively cooled Gigabyte n6200-TC video card installed.


With the fan from the Revo running at full speed it is louder than the stock Intel heatsink. However, when the heatsink is ran off the PWM header and the motherboard is allowed to adjust the fan speed, the Revo becomes one of the quietest coolers in the test group. With the fan spinning at only 480 RPM, the Revo comes in at 44 dB.