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Danger Den MAZE4 Intro Kit - English |
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martes, 20 de marzo de 2007 |
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Página 12 de 14
Basically, our first impression was favorable, but there are some details that we would like to look further into.
First, the noise level. Many users are accustomed to putting up with the constant and painful noise produced by some air cooling systems. For us, this is an important issue, which we always pay attention to, since it affects noticeably the user’s comfort.
As we mentioned before, some air cooling users will not notice the difference between their current PC and the fan included in the Kit, which -in our opinion- is unnecessarily noisy. Still, the last word has not been said yet.
The fan’s air flow is quite high, and more than sufficient for the real needs of the
radiator. We first presumed that the people from Danger Den took this fact into account and added a fan of ample performance in order to give the user an extra margin and the possibility of regulating the fan’s spinning speed, with the resulting noise reduction. Later on, they explained to us that the main reason for this fan choice was its low cost, since a silent Papst fan, the one they are also accustomed to using, would increase the kit’s price. But what would be the results if we ran the same test, but this time with the fan at 7V instead of 12V?
The chart confirms all what we suspected. With the fan at a lower voltage, the performance was still outstanding. As it is clearly shown, the temperature difference did not even reach 2C, while that of the noise was absolutely remarkable.
Let us focus on the performance of the radiator itself. We have previously seen its behavior with less air flow than the fan can actually give (although that air flow is enough for us). Now we will take it to the extreme.
For the next test, the processor will be at full load but the fan will be off until high temperature is reached. In that moment, the fan will be turned on and we will observe how long it takes for the radiator to eliminate all the energy accumulated in the water plus the one the processor produces at full load nonstop.
From the processor’s idle state, it is clearly shown that the temperature begins to increase gradually. This was forseeable, since the radiator with no air circulation does not have the possibility of eliminationg the heat the water accumulates. After completing an entire Super Pi 32M cycle, with the same as previous voltage and overclock, the processor barely reached the 55C we set as the limit to turn on the fan. Consequently, we waited some minutes to see how the temperature estabilized with the processor in idle, and then ran the Super Pi test again. This time, the temperature soon reached the set limit and we turned on the fan. The processor took 8 minutes in reaching the previous temperature levels, which indicates that the radiator not only is capable of dissipating the heat produced by the processor in this extreme condition, but also has a margin for releasing all the heat accumulated in the water which was produced during an entire cycle (kids, do not try this at home!)
In other words, appearances can be deceiving. Do not let yourself be fooled by the radiator’s small size. We have proved in a practical way that it is capable of working with more thermal load than an overdemanded A64, and there is still heat-dissipating capacity to add more blocks to the system, if we wanted to.
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