Testing:
Testing of the
Thermalright V1 Ultra was conducted on a test system with the specifications listed below:
» AMD Athlon-64 3200+ Venice core processor
» Thermalright SI-120 CPU cooler
» ASUS A8N-E nForce4 Ultra motherboard
» 2x 1GB Corsair PC3500 DDR
» 1x 200GB Seagate 7200.8 SATA hard drive
» Thermaltake Swing case
» 128MB Gigabyte Radeon X600XT PCIe graphics card
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The Gigabyte X600XT's stock cooler and a passively cooled Thermaltake Schooner were used as points of reference in testing the V1 Ultra. The stock cooler is a small heatsink with an unreliable fan, so unless monitored it is also a passively cooled device!
A Cooler Master Aerogate bay device was used to monitor the ambient temperature, as well as the temperature of the graphics processor. One probe was placed as close to the graphics processor's core as possible, which I assumed would be tricky with the design of the V1 Ultra, but a small opening allowed the probe to slide in as if it was designed for such use.
The idle conditions were achieved by having the system loaded to the Windows XP Professional desktop, with no other applications running. The load conditions were achieved by running Futuremark's 3DMark03 repeatedly in order to keep the graphics card stressed and running warm. The case's side panel was removed throughout testing and the Aerogate indicated an ambient temperature of 20C.
Each round of idle or load testing was allowed to continue for a minimum of one hour, and the results are summarized in the graph below:
As you can see, when the stock cooler was functioning properly, it provided the best cooling by a few degrees in the load condition. But, in the battle of the two passive coolers, the Thermalright V1 Ultra is the winner. It shaves 2-3 degrees off of the performance of the Thermaltake Schooner, regardless of the activity of the card.
It would have been interesting to see the V1 Ultra dominate when installed with its fan, but even when used passively the cooler did quite well.
