CPU Cooler Charts 2008, Part 3 - Are Box Coolers any Good?

Prescott FMB2 C40387 - The Prescott's First Cooler

When Intel introduced the Socket 775 platform, the processors of the day were still using the 90 nm Prescott core. Prescott was known as one of the most power-hungry cores Intel has ever designed, dissipating a great deal more heat than its predecessors built around the 130 nm Northwood core. The new socket also required a new box cooler, which Intel presented with the model reviewed here. Its name, "Prescott FMB2", already indicates that this model was developed specifically for the new processor core.

FMB-2 Qualification Sample

This "grandfather" of all 775 box coolers had a tremendous impact on all box cooler models that followed. Its basic design, using a fan blowing air onto a cooler with arched cooling fins from above, was kept throughout subsequent generations - indeed, only details were changed when a new model was released. In some cases, the size and direction of the cooling fins was changed, the fins were bifurcated, the base of the cooler's copper core was made a little larger, or the fan speed was adjusted to better suit the CPU.

FMB-2 Engineering Sample

Among our editors, the FMB2 samples proved hard to forget, simply for their very high noise level, especially compared to the previous Socket 478 versions. Running at over 46 dB(A), this cooler easily topped almost all coolers we had tested before. Sadly, this did not translate into equally impressive cooling performance. At 93°C, the quad-core test CPU was extremely close to its thermal throttling threshold, making this cooler a poor choice for today's generation of multi-core CPUs.

The retail box of the FMB-2

The contact surface of the FMB-2