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Intel’s enthusiast platform puts out the heat—here are seven ways to take it off
Intel’s Sandy Bridge-E enthusiast platform brings with it a new Intel socket, and that means new cooler mounting brackets! One nice thing about the X79 chipset: The boards ship with an integrated universal CPU mounting backplate, so no more fiddling around behind the motherboard.
Now, the new chipset hasn't been out that long, so cooler manufacturers are still working on getting their products compatible with the universal backplate. We were able to wrangle up seven LGA2011-compatible CPU coolers, ranging in price from $30 to $120, to see how they cope with the new mounting system and whether they’re up to the task of cooling an overclocked Sandy Bridge-E CPU.
We tested each cooler on a test bed with an Asus P9X79 Deluxe motherboard, a i7-3960X CPU, 16GB of DDR3, and a Thermaltake Level 10 GT case with its stock fans running at “high.” The i7-3960X is the flagship Sandy Bridge-E CPU, and contains six cores and support for 40 PCIe lanes. Its Turbo mode hits 3.9GHz out of the box, but we’ve clocked the proc up to 4.2GHz. We tested each cooler after an hour of idling and an hour of full burn at 4.2GHz, using the Sandy Bridge-E version of Intel’s internal thermal testing utility, and measuring the core temperatures with HWMonitor. To further level the playing field, we’re using the same thermal interface material for each cooler, eschewing the included thermal pastes in favor of Arctic Silver’s Lumiere, which we’ve used for all our cooler tests for years. In a sidebar, we’ll also talk about the effect of thermal paste on CPU performance.
Because very few of us run our CPUs at 100 percent across all cores for long stretches of time, the burn temperatures represent worst-case scenarios—this should be the hottest these CPUs ever get.
Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss
What, this old thing? Cooler Master’s Hyper 212 Evo is the new
More...
Now, the new chipset hasn't been out that long, so cooler manufacturers are still working on getting their products compatible with the universal backplate. We were able to wrangle up seven LGA2011-compatible CPU coolers, ranging in price from $30 to $120, to see how they cope with the new mounting system and whether they’re up to the task of cooling an overclocked Sandy Bridge-E CPU.
We tested each cooler on a test bed with an Asus P9X79 Deluxe motherboard, a i7-3960X CPU, 16GB of DDR3, and a Thermaltake Level 10 GT case with its stock fans running at “high.” The i7-3960X is the flagship Sandy Bridge-E CPU, and contains six cores and support for 40 PCIe lanes. Its Turbo mode hits 3.9GHz out of the box, but we’ve clocked the proc up to 4.2GHz. We tested each cooler after an hour of idling and an hour of full burn at 4.2GHz, using the Sandy Bridge-E version of Intel’s internal thermal testing utility, and measuring the core temperatures with HWMonitor. To further level the playing field, we’re using the same thermal interface material for each cooler, eschewing the included thermal pastes in favor of Arctic Silver’s Lumiere, which we’ve used for all our cooler tests for years. In a sidebar, we’ll also talk about the effect of thermal paste on CPU performance.
Because very few of us run our CPUs at 100 percent across all cores for long stretches of time, the burn temperatures represent worst-case scenarios—this should be the hottest these CPUs ever get.
Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss
What, this old thing? Cooler Master’s Hyper 212 Evo is the new
More...