ZEROtherm BTF90 CPU Cooler

Testing:

For the testing section of this review, I will be putting the ZEROtherm BTF90 up against an Intel stock CPU cooler, a Scythe Mine III cooler with a 120 mm fan, and the ever popular Tuniq Tower cooler, which also has a 120 mm fan. There will be four scenarios tested here. I will install the individual cooler and let the system idle at stock CPU speed for 15 minutes and record the temperature. I will then run Prime 95 to load the system to 100% of CPU usage and let it run for an hour before recording its temperature. Since I am using a CPU that has two cores, I will run two instances of Prime 95 and set the affinity within the program so that each core is assigned to a specific instance of Prime 95.

I will then put a modest overclock on the CPU and repeat the above tests at idle and 100% load. All values will be in degrees Celsius with an ambient temperature of 22 degrees Celsius.

Testing Setup:

• Intel Conroe 6300 1.86 GHz
• Intel Stock Cooler
• Scythe Mine III Cooler
• Tuniq Tower 120 Cooler
• ZEROtherm BTF90 Cooler
• Gigabyte GA965-S3
• Super Talent T1000UX2G5 DDR2-1000 5-5-5-15 (2 x 1 GB)
• BFG GeForce 7600 gt oc
• OCZ GameXtreme 600 watt PSU
• Seagate 320 GB SATA2 7200 RPM 16 MB HDD
• Pioneer DVR-K06 DVD +-RW(+-R DL)/ DVD-RAM
• Windows XP Pro SP2

These results are with just a moderate overclock on the CPU. If I were to push the overclock further, we may see a wider margin of differences, but due to the Intel stock cooler not being able to handle much more, this is as far as I went.