Cooling Capacity
NorthQ's cooler is somewhat louder than its rival from Zalman, presumably because of its corrugated plates. At the lowest speed, we measured a barely audible 33.4 dB(A); at the highest setting the noise level went up to 44.8 dB(A), and was somewhat annoying. Yet it's not too loud to work.
At full power the temperature of the Pentium 4 580 was 58° C; at the lowest speed the temperature was 65 °C, which doesn't cause the CPU to throttle, so the values are fine.
We calculated a thermal resistance of 0.27 K/W, which is good.
The NorthQ cooler sells for around $45. We would recommend it for users who use the Athlon XP processor but who want a cooler that will still be up-to-date in the future.
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