A requirement for optimal cooling: Anti-vibration strips are applied at the bottom of the CPU socket. Nothing works without cooling compound!

We already determined in the previous test that only a few coolers offer a good overall solution that in terms of both high cooling performance and minimal noise level. Furthermore, only very few coolers yielded optimal cooling results by our standards.

The testing platform consisted of an AMD reference board (AMD EVT5-BX-004) equipped with its very own AMD760 chipset. All readings are based on an AMD Athlon 1000, which runs with a front side bus of 100 MHz. The operating system we used was Windows 98 SE.

To keep the CPU load as to 100% as possible, we used the familiar Seti program. At the same time, we used Flask Mpeg to produce an MPEG-4 video and tested the playback. This ensured that the processor was continuously operating at maximum potential and that the heat ouput reached its maximum.

All readings were taken in our Munich lab at a room temperature of exactly 22°C. The noise tests were conducted with our newly conditioned noise-measuring box, which simulates a room almost completely void of any sound.