Installing this heatsink on the LGA platform is sadly not quite as simple as mounting it up on the Athlon 64 platform, albeit by just a few steps. To get things rolling, you'll have to remove your motherboard and screw in the new retention bracket, laying down a fresh layer of thermal grease on your CPU as you flip the board. All that's left to do from this point is put the sink down, latch the clips and fiddle with them until they both lock into place. While we may admit it's not the world's simplest, we feel that it's leagues ahead of the fiddling about with nuts required by the Big Typhoon. When this is done, just hook up the control and power wiring, and everything is good to go. One minor recommendation to those users of the LGA platform though – keep that fan running on high. With the installation over and done with its time to continue on with further testing.
Considering how you've read our methodology in the latter page, we've opted to simply give the heat output figures and frequency steps for our Stock and Overclocked situations. Stock settings provide us 84 Watts of heat at 15*300, utilizing 1.425V. Boosting our system's clocks to 3.5GHz at 233*15 gives us 109W, a figure surprisingly close to that of our Overclocked Athlon 64 setup, yet with vastly different thermal results.
Test Bed
- 530J Chip
- NVIDIA C19-CRB
- 2.0 GB Crucial Ballistix DD2-667/800
- NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT
- Ultra 600W Power Supply
- Open Air Test Bench
Stock Clock Results
Overclocked Results
As with the Athlon 64 section of this review, we can see the 3D Cooler excels on its highest fan speed, but has trouble coping with increased thermal loads, especially as the loads go up. This inability reaches a breaking point where S&M crashes at 75c when the fan is set to low. Then again, there's no real surprise here, as the back of the box recommends maximum fan speed for overclocking, and considering that most of the whine of the fan comes from air whistling through the fins at this speed, it's highly recommended that you take the road of most airflow when overclocking on this sink.
