Asetek Vapochill Vapor Phase Cooling System

The Asetek Vapochill Vapor Phase Cooling System Taking the Pentium 4 To 3.3GHz And Beyond

By, Dave Altavilla October 23, 2002

Here's the list of components we chose to populate our Vapochill test rig.  Asetek sent us the unit fully configure in a "barebones" setup with a 1.8GHz Pentium 4.  However, you do realize we had to completely tear it down and build it up with the most overclockable motherboard and fastest processor we could find, don't you?  Of course you do. Test System Components Getting chilly with it   Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz ASUS P4PE - i845PE Motherboard 512MB PC3200 Corsair CAS2 DDR DRAM Sapphire Radeon 9700 Atlantis Pro Quantum Fireball AS40 ATA-100 7200RPM Hard Drive On board sound WinXP Professional w/ SP1 DirectX 8.1 Intel Chipset Drivers Version 4.04   Firstly, it's important to note that if you expect to hit serious overclocked speeds, you need quality, high performance RAM, plain and simple.  The folks at Corsair have been producing some of the most stable and high performance DDR DRAM modules that we've seen on the market, as of late.  We used a 512MB PC3200 CAS2 stick from Corsair and it flies right on up to 400MHz and beyond, with full stability at CAS2.  But enough about our test system setup.  Let's see what the Vapochill is capable of. ChillControl, Overclocking  and The Chill Details

Thermic Acceleration At Its Best

We played around with fan speeds and the "Heat Load" setting, until we reached an optimal compromise between noise (or lack thereof) and performance.  The Heat Load setting refers to how much power is driven to the heating elements in an effort to keep the CPU pins and the CPU socket area around the motherboard warm.  After extended periods of use, we were not very concerned with seeing any condensation, so we dialed the Heat Load down to 20%.  We were living on the edge... well sort of...but not really.  Then we booted the system up and took a quick look around the BIOS.  Notice our CPU, when at default voltage and idle, is registering a Sub Zero  -7°C temp.  One word for this spectacle, "Nice!"  Then we dialed in FSB and memory timings until we found our sweet spot in clock speed and stability under full load.
 

As you can see, we were actually able to boot WinXP at 3.5GHz.  We should note that this was achieved with Asetek's "Standard Edition" unit that we received, which has the ability to handle up to 130W of heat at full load.  The "Premium Edition" handles 160W and could have potentially given us the ability to overclock higher.  We found full stability was achieved at 3.317GHz with a 158MHz System Bus.  That's a little over 500MHz beyond the stock speed of our Pentium 4.  The CPU's core voltage was set to 1.75V and we were able to run a loop of 3DMark 2001SE benchmark runs, with SETI and CPUBurn4 running in the background, overnight for over 8 hours of testing.  The processor was held at 100% full load for the entire time of testing. 

At that point, we called it stable.  It was time to move on to benchmarking our system, in order to see just what the fruits of our labor would bring.
 

Benchmarks With A Vapochilled 3.3GHz Pentium 4 Even Tom Can Do This!

Some philosphy:
 
Since a certain web site, was recently bragging about being able to show you the performance level of the next generation Pentium 4 cores, we want to be very specific and clear to you on the scores you'll see in the coming pages.  These tests were run on a 2.8GHz Pentium Northwood Processor.  They are not representative of the performance levels of an actual 3.3GHz Pentium 4, that will be shown here when that processor core is officially released by Intel.  Ours is an overclocked unit with a different core technology and does not have the ability to run with Hyperthreading enabled like Intel's next generation chip will allow.  These scores will give you an indication of what a 3.3GHz Pentium 4 can do, but to compare it to Intel's upcoming processors would not be an apples to apples discussion. 
 
So with that out of the way, let's take a look at the drag race you've been waiting for.

SiSoft SANDRA Testing:

You've got to love free speed.  In this quick testing, Sandra shows our overclocked Pentium 4 to be significantly faster than the 3GHz reference system  score, which stands to reason.  Sandra's integer test favors the Athlon XP 2800+ but shows strength to the P4 in FPU performance.  Finally, the ever fabulous Asus P4PE i845PE motherboard, allows us to overclock our Corsair stick to 420MHz and keep them at CAS 2.

More Benchmarks!