Considering the simplicity of the sink itself, it would be a shame to have a complicated mounting system. Thankfully, this is one of the many areas that Asus seems to have put special care into, as mounting is quite a simple process, but unfortunately one that may end up being permanent. To start things off, you'll have to remove your motherboard, and then peel away the protective top on the metal backplate, lining it up with the board's holes and pressing down. Next off, simply flip the board over, clean off your existing layer of thermal grease, put the heatsink down and screw it down, plug it in, and away you go. Simple, no? With the mounting simplicity in mind, let's proceed onto our methodology, and then to if this sink is efficient as it is easy to use shall we?
For our Overclocking tests (of air cooling at least) we utilize two levels of heat output, at stock and when overclocked. Stock constitutes the processor at 200x15 with 1.425V and Overclock constitutes 233x15 with 1.5V. While we know this processor can go higher, we're not exactly comfortable about giving it more voltage when load temperatures already tap the sensor out at 80 Celsius.
Our testing methodology is as follows - we take four separate measurements to show different load levels for the processor: We have a no load 15 minute period as our idle, 30 minutes of Folding @ Home to show a low priority load, 10 Loops of SiSoft Sandra's Burn in wizard to demonstrate a high priority load, and a standard S&M processor test loop to demonstrate a critical load. Our test bed consists of the following:
Test Bed
- NVIDIA C19 CRB Motherboard
- Intel Pentium 4 530J
- 2x512MB Modules of PC2-5300 Crucial Ballistix
- Ultra 600W PSU
- Onboard Temperature Sensors
- Open Air Test Bench
Stock CPU
Overclocked Results
The only thing to say here is a simple wow, with performance as incredible as this; we can safely assume one of two things, both of which carry equal merit. First of all, there is a good chance that this cooler is actually able to keep the chip as chilly as the board tells us it is, with the design of the sink allowing for items around the socket to be cooled before they can heat the socket up. The second theory is that thanks to the focused airflow, the CPU temperature sensor is being cooled more than the CPU is, resulting in skewed numbers. Regardless, the fact that this heatsink easily kept our chip chilly while able to chill the surrounding circuitry, all with silence is definitely impressive.
