VapoChill XE II
Cooling Performance
With our VapoChill XE II test system built-up, we set out to see just how powerful the unit really was, and whether or not we'd be able to overclock our particular system higher than it had ever been before. Throughout each step in the process, we recorded actual temperatures (from our CPU's thermal probe, not the XE II's monitoring software) and compared them to a Thermaltake Volcano 7+...
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(Note: Some motherboards report temperatures differently, depending on how their BIOS is tuned. The temperatures reported here could vary using a different motherboard.)
This first set of temperatures were recorded before we overclocked the test system. We first tested the VapoChill XE II with our Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processor running at its default clock speed of 3.4GHz and at its default voltage. With the system idling, the VapoChill XE II was able to keep our processor running at an impressive -17'C, embarrassing the Thermaltake air cooler in the process. We then fired up two instances of Folding @ Home (Graphical client and Service) to stress the processor, and run it at 100% utilization. We found that while operating under load, the Vapochill XE II was still able to keep the processor running well below zero, while the air cooler couldn't keep the CPU cooler than 54'C.
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Thermaltake Volcano 7+=3.7GHz | Vapochill XE II=4.12GHz
Thermaltake Volcano 7+=3.7GHz | Vapochill XE II=4.12GHz
(Note: Some motherboards report temperatures differently, depending on how their BIOS is tuned. The temperatures reported here could vary using a different motherboard.)
The Vapochill XE II continued to perform well when we overclocked our CPU. For this test, we bumped the CPU's core voltage up to 1.75v and increased the CPU's clock speed (using a combination of multipliers and FSB speed) until the test system was no longer stable. When using the Thermaltake air cooler, the highest clock speed we could hit with this configuration was 3.7GHz. But with the Vapochill XE II we were able to take the CPU all the way up amazingly to 4.128GHz.
At these overclocked speeds, the Vapochill XE II was again able to maintain a sub-zero core temperature while the system was idle. With the system running under full load while overclocked, the Vapochill XE II broke into the positive side of the temperature scale, but at 3'C, its performance was still nothing but impressive.
We should mention that the evaporator's temperature remained MUCH lower than what our motherboard was reporting for the CPU temperature. For example, in our overclocked test, our Abit motherboard was reporting a core temperature of 3'C under load, but the Vapochill XE II control panel software was reporting an evaporator temperature of -28'C. The actual CPU temperature probably falls somewhere in between the two.
