Conclusion - Water Coolers Beat All Conventional Coolers
The cooling system we built ourselves was able to maintain a constant temperature of 24 °C. The best cooler from out last comparative test - the Swiftech 462 - (A Comparison of 46 Coolers) - managed to reach a temperature of 30 °C. This chart shows the speeds of the AMD Athlon processors that we overclocked in the laboratory. Overclocking rates were the best for the AMD Duron 750 out of all the AMD processors - a whopping 30 percent increase when using a water cooler. Results like these are impossible if you use either an el cheapo standard cooler or a powerful conventional cooler.
The Duron 750 operated completely stable at 1050 MHz. In terms of percentages, Athlon clock speeds of 1200, 1300, and 1333 MHz don't lend themselves as well to overclocking, as you can see in our charts.
We also tested our cooling system on the 1400 MHz AMD Athlon, which will be introduced in a few days. However, we didn't include these results in our charts. -Finally, the components we used in our cooling system cost a total of about 115 to 135 dollars. Overclocking aficionados shouldn't pinch any pennies, taking great care when selecting their components.
This, however, is not the last word on cooling systems - in our next article, we will present a souped-up version of our water cooler that achieves considerably better results, for almost the exact same price.
