- Comparing Water Coolers: We Follow Your Lead
- Thermalright's New Graphics Card Coolers
- Scythe Ninja Plus takes on Three TEC Heavyweights
- Radical CPU Coolers from CoolIT
- A Beginner's Guide For WaterCooling Your PC
- Vigor's Monsoon II TEC CPU Cooler
- Thermalright's HR-03 Is A VGA Cooler Gorilla!
- VGA Heat-Pipe Cooler Roundup 2006
- Six New AMD Coolers: Cold Enough For You?
- Readers' Responses to Strip Out The Fans, Add 8 Gallons of Cooking Oil
- CPU Cooler Charts 2008, Part I - Loosing Your Cool?
- CPU Cooler Charts 2008, Part 3 - Are Box Coolers any Good?
- CPU Cooler Charts 2008, Part 2
- Zalman 8700 NOT bad, pretty good
- Core 2 Quad and Duo Temperature Guide
- water cooling or aircooled extreme cpu?
- Combinate Water-, Air- and Heatsink-cooling system?
- does any know of a good heat sink for a x38/x48 with the stock north b
- Need build help!!
Zerotherm Nirvana NV120 - The Hardware Killer
Source: Tom's Hardware US – Keywords: cpu, cooler, charts, 2008
Syndication:
Zerotherm Nirvana NV120 - The Hardware Killer
Zerotherm appalled us with its newest cooler product, the Nirvana NV120. We feel obligated to point out the dangers and risks that are associated with using this cooler. If you are not very careful when installing it, you can easily damage or even destroy your PC components.

Zerotherm Nirvana NV120
The backplate, which is mounted in the back of the motherboard, is covered with a transparent adhesive foil. When removing the protective sticker from the backplate, it is far too easy to accidentally pull off this adhesive film too. As a result, the bare metal will press against the reverse side of the CPU socket, creating a short circuit that can destroy your entire motherboard. In the worst case, this can even affect other components as well.

Hardware-Killer

Metal shavings already caused problems with the previous model
Another reason we had to fail this cooler is that it, too, suffers from the already well-known problem with metal shavings. When you attach the cooler by fastening the screws, metal shavings can fall from the screws and springs and fall into the hardware of your PC - again causing a short circuit. This is not a new problem, but one that we've mentioned in previous reviews.

A look at the cooler from below

Mounting components
When running at its highest fan speed, the Nirvana NV120 achieves good cooling performance, able to cool the quad-core CPU to 65°C. However, it is unbearably loud at this setting. At its lowest speed, the CPU temperature rises to 74°C and the cooler is completely inaudible. Its noise level increases when the fan speed is raised by more than 33%. Thus, only the lowest fan speed will allow you to work without the cooler's noise becoming an annoyance.


In our eyes, a price of $46 is too steep for the performance this cooler offers.

The retail package

| Technical Data | ||
|---|---|---|
| CPU | 100% load | idle |
| Temperature 12V | 64.75°C | 35°C |
| Temperature 5V | 74.25°C | 36°C |
| Noise | 49.1 dB(A) | 37.9 dB(A) |
| Fan Speed | 2460 RPM | 1040 RPM |
| Weight | 698 grams | |
| Intel Socket | 775 | |
| AMD Socket | AM2 | AM2+ |
| 939 | 940 | |

Installation
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your numbers of near 70C on every cooler is outrageous, if those numbers are true not a single one of these coolers would keep a computer stable in a closed case outside the northeast. and a couple minutes isnt a good measure of cpus final temp, if u look over a temp log after a long game session you know it creeps up. to many factors.
Bullshit article.I agree with wkornf.
If my Artic silver 5 + Scythe Katana 2 cooler(for only a massive price of 25 USD! I can keep my outdated Pentium D under 100 degrees fahrenheit,infact around HALF of these tests,even under water cooling? Wow,according to this,I should actually worry about getting a quad core because of the heat.And no,I don't have any fans in my case,it's open,only fans are from my GPU,CPU,and my PSU.
No extra 4 250mm performance fans.And an X38? That's just unbelievable.
Do you guys get the point? They maxed out everything, so the cooler could show off the best that it could do in the most extreme conditions.
A good article, i especially like the tests for installation and sound, as those are what i would look into most when purchasing a cooler, and unlike CPUs, there are usually no charts to go along with.
alot of the coolers listed of a particular design are installed all goofy like, Of course on their open setup it doesn't make much difference(i think)
but when installed in a normal ATX case, would be detrimental to the coolers performance. Especially coolers designed similar to the Noctua and Scythe Ninja plus.
I can't be certain about others but Arctic Cooling's Freezer 7 Pro is supposed to be installed like this(one would assume others of similar design would be the same)
http://bigrockies.com/media/cooler.jpg
cliffro I think to some degree you are correct but it still does not follow good practice when supposedly collecting data to represent consumer products.
As these have published manufacturer recomended installations why would you reverse it.
I recently read a review of the latest Noctua cooler at Legitreviews
where Noctua actually contacted them on this very issue... as a result they retested and found some improvement in cooling.
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/741/1/
You guys might want to reexamine the Zerotherm Nirvana NV120... I just picked one up (after much research), and all of the problems mentioned in the review seem to be fixed in the newer models... no more metal base, no more metal shavings, and near silent operation except at full speed. I've been using Zalman CNPS coolers ever since the 7000 series, and will likely be switching to the NV120 for performance systems now. Just my 2c
@guyladouche... actually it all depends which cooler you are talking about,
As said the Noctua is setup with the fan on top blowing down, which is the only config that Noctua dont support.
The Thermalright has the fan in the middle blowing up so it looks like there is no real consistancy in the test methods... but I would like to hear from the testers in case they found some reason to use each particular setup.
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Thank you, been wondering what cooler to buy for an OCed Quad, and high temps are good when dying