Test Configuration And Cooling Performance
Test System
To ensure test score compatibility with the air cooling products already tested, we reviewed the Corsair H70 liquid cooling system using the same old, proven test system. At its heart, we find an Intel Pentium D840 Extreme Edition CPU with a Smithfield core, manufactured using 90 nm technology and employing a factory clock speed 3.2 GHz. The TDP (Thermal Design Power) is 130 W (the same as an Intel Core i7 CPU based on the Bloomfield core).
The Intel Pentium D840 Extreme Edition CPU is far more inefficient than the current Intel Core i7, of course. But then again, we are measuring temperatures here, not performance. To quite literally turn the heat up some more the CPU is overclocked to 3.6 GHz. Also, we use the thermal compound applied to the water block at the factory.
The ambient temperature was 21° C. Further test system details can be found in the table below.
| System Hardware | |
|---|---|
| Intel Platform (LGA 775) | Gigabyte GA-G33-DS3R, Intel G33, BIOS: F5 (09/07/07) |
| CPU | Intel Pentium D 840 Extreme Edition (90 nm SmithField core) @ 3.60 GHz |
| RAM | 4 x 512MB Samsung M3 78T6553CZ3-CE6 DDR2-667 |
| System Hard Drive | Hitachi Deskstar 7K250, 160 GB, 7200 RPM, SATA 1.5Gb/s, 8 MB Cache |
| DVD-ROM | Samsung SH-D163B, SATA 1.5Gb/s |
| Graphics Card | Intel GMA 3100 Onboard |
| Network Card | Realtek RTL8168/8111 PCIe Gigabit Ethernet NIC |
| Sound Card | Integrated |
| PSU | SilverStone SST-ST50EF, 500 Watt |
| System Software | |
| OS | Windows Vista Enterprise SP1 |
| DirectX 10 | DirectX 10 (Vista Standard) |
| DirectX 9 | Version: April 2007 |
| Graphic Drivers | Version 6.0.6000.16386 (Vista Standard) |
| Network Drivers | 9.0.32.3 (Vista Standard) |
| Intel Chipset Drivers | Version 8.3.0.1011 (05/02/2007) |
| JMicron Chipset Drivers | Version 1.17.15.0 (24/03/2007) |
Fan Configuration and Speed Control
As mentioned, the Corsair H70 comes with two fans. For our tests, we fit the radiator with only one, and then both fans. The fans only have 3-pin connectors, and therefore cannot be controlled via the pulse width modulation (PWM) features offered by many newer motherboards. However, the motherboard we used for the test had a BIOS setting for automatically controlling the voltage supplied to the fans. We used this setting both with one and two fans, and in the graphs on the following pages this is referred to as “Auto”.
The BIOS did not have a way of manually setting the fans to high or low, however, so we turned off the feature for those tests. Instead we used the included resistor cables to operate the fans at Low speed. For the High speed tests we simply ran the fans with neither resistor cables nor BIOS settings--au naturelle.
