A License To Cool: NVentiv Mach II For 2.8 GHz

We at the THG lab are well acquainted with the Mach II compressor cooler system. NVentiv, formerly Chip-con, stepped up its sales activities so that the Mach II is now available in all major European countries as well as in North America. Although we have already featured the system, AMD up and asked us to test one of the fastest base systems for its powerhouse gaming platform. Except for some changes to the cooling head absorption system, the Mach II barebones has basically the same design. Compared to our previous tests, where we took great pains to gradually increase the clock speed, nVentiv offers an increase of 27 per cent right out of the box. In real terms that means that you can pump up the Athlon 64 FX-51 at 2.2 GHz to 2.8 GHz, without your memory, AGP or FSB speeds being affected in the slightest. All you need is a special BIOS from Asus that you can set to raise the CPU clock multiplier to as high as 14.

View of the opened barebones system from nVentiv, as Chip-con is now called. It is almost the same configuration as in our last test - only the cooler head was modified for the Athlon 64 FX (Socket 940).

We took a hard look at this system alongside an Intel P4 back in June, and published the following article: Prometeia Mach 2: Best Compressor Cooler for x86 CPUs . For all the compressor-cooler junkies out there we have also recorded a video which gives you a simple, step-by-step demo on how to put it all together.

Pressure? No problem: the 105G compressor from Danfoss.

Reading in BIOS: a CPU die temperature of -22°C. Be forewarned that this isn't a totally reliable reading.

Video 8 To Download: Tried-and-True Chip-con On The Test Bench

THG has regularly produced videos showing the strengths and weaknesses of certain pieces of hardware. Video 8 shows how to configure and assemble a compressor cooler system for extreme clocking while still keeping operation stable. You can download older videos here. What is more, we compressed Video 8 with a ZIP compression program, reducing the download file to 16.2 MB. With a playing time of 3 minutes and 42 seconds plus stereo sound, the average data rate is 4.4 MB/min or 76.5 kB/s. Given a resolution of 540x432 pixels that's not bad, especially as there is very little image noise.

You can download Video 8 here .

Requirements For Playing Videos

The most important thing to have installed on your PC in order to play back videos is the DivX codec - the current version is 5.1. You can download the codec on the DivX.com website .

This codec handles the video side of playback. Since we compressed the audio signal in MP3 format, which is supplied with most Windows versions, there's no need to download an extra audio driver.