Installation and Testing
Both the Gamer Storm and the Ice Warrior had similar installation mechanisms. The custom motherboard plate meant that you have to take out the board from the casing before you could install the CPU Cooler. While the retention plates for AMD and Intel sockets are different, the same Intel plate can be adjusted to accommodate all the three supported Intel sockets (LGA 1366 / LGA 1156 / LGA 775) by simply sliding the plate and screws.
Thanks to using spring mounted screws and washers, the heatsink is installed with equal pressure on both sides so that it would sit perfectly flat on the surface of the CPU. The package also has a small syringe of thermal paste which can last over 10 applications at least. Though I preferred to use the DeepCool Z9 Thermal Compound for my testing which was also supplied with the product samples and happens to be DeepCool’s flagship thermal compound solution.
Installation was pretty straightforward thanks to a really good installation guide in the box. All you had to do was just remove the motherboard from the case, remove the old cooler, take of the old back plate from the underside of the motherboard, and install the new back plate. After that just install the screw threads, and the insulation washers, fit the appropriate retention plates on the cooler, apply the thermal compound and the finally place and screw in the cooler.
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Test System |
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Processor |
AMD Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition (OC to 3.6GHz, 1.45V, ~150W) |
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Motherboard |
MSI 790GX-G65 |
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Memory |
Corsair XMS3 2x2GB DDR3 1333MHz |
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Graphics Card |
HIS Radeon HD 5770 1GB (OC to 950MHz shader, 1350MHz memory) |
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Casing |
Cooler Master CM690 |
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Power Supply |
ASUS U-65GA 650W |
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Hard Drive |
Western Digital Caviar Green 640GB |
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Case Fans |
2x Stock CM690 120mm (side intake and rear exhaust) 1x Stock CM690 120mm LED (front bottom intake) 1x Noise Blocker M12-P 120mm (bottom intake) 1x Noise Blocker PK-3 140mm (top rear exhaust) 1x DeepCool UF140 140mm (top front intake) 1x DeepCool UF120 120mm (front top intake) |
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CPU Coolers |
DeepCool Gamer Storm (with stock 120mm fan, 1500RPM) DeepCool Ice Warrior (with stock 120mm fan, 1500RPM) GlacialTech F101 (with stock 120mm fan, 900RPM) |
Unfortunately, right before testing, we had a little accident with our Intel system so we had to rely on this AMD unit for the entire series of tests. To give you an idea of how it would perform with Intel CPU, I overclocked the system to go as high as 3.6GHz which produces heat around 150W when running at a Vcore of 1.45V at 100% load. Sure the test numbers might not be exactly what you get on an Intel system this way, but they would be pretty close.
All the testing was done running stress tests on Prime95 64-bit under Windows 7 64-bit. Flip the page to see the temperatures.
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