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Cool down, Dude

Taming noise problems and cooling. Thermaltake’s Max Orb, CoreTemp by Arthur Liberman

By Ted Pollak

It all started with a terrible buzzing coming from a fan in my computer during heavy game play; I couldn’t take it—it was similar to what a mosquito must experience from those ultra sonic repellant devices.

I assumed that my twin ATI X1950XTX’s were running on a fixed fan speed so I concluded that the sound must be coming from my CPU cooler. Well I was wrong on both counts; but learned a little about heat and performance along the way.

I first set a benchmark for the cooler that was already on my system using a great program shareware called Core Temp (http://www.thecoolest.zerobrains.com/CoreTemp/) which not only gives you individual core temps for multi-core CPU’s but also creates an audit trail of the readings based on your desired time interval. (I used 5 seconds.) The Thermaltake K450 on my AMD FX-60 was an aftermarket cooler that uses heat pipes and fins. I have read that the stock cooler under max load keeps the cores at about 60 degrees Celsius and about 44 when idling; the K450 brought this down to about 52 degrees at load and 42 idling.

Figure 1. Before: Thermaltake K450. (Source: Thermaltake)

Believing that the K450 was the source of my noise problem; the nice folks at Thermaltake offered to send me their flagship air cooler—the Max Orb (around $50 to $60). This thing is almost worth buying on looks alone (if you have a clear side panel case). It’s the engineering equivalent of a sculpture in a museum. (And it has glowing blue led lights to enhance the cool looks even further.)

When it arrived in the mail I eagerly went to work under the hood of my gaming rig and within 15 minutes I was done and my patience was done. With thermal grease on my clothes, grunts, groans, and cursing, I couldn’t get the damn thing on even with phone support. The installation manual is horrendous. Granted the cooler comes with equipment to mount it on multiple CPU types I just couldn’t figure it out. So—I dropped off the whole kit and caboodle at Central Computer Systems in San Francisco; $44 and 30 minutes later the tech called and said “That was easy.” Grrrrrrr.

Folks—unless you are a pro-wrencher under the hood of a computer just let the tech guys do a cooler install. You relieve yourself of some liability that way as well. (This is coming from someone who fried their motherboard with static discharge during the last “project” under the hood.)

Well, for all the hassles and expense of installation the thing is simply amazing. Idle temperatures are as low as 28 degrees and max load has never exceeded 42 degrees. That’s almost a 43% reduction in heat at max load compared to the stock cooler. In my opinion $100 (including installation) is a small price to pay to for this kind of performance; though it’s affect on processing speed will depend on the program being used.

Figure . After: Thermaltake MaxOrb. (Source: Thermaltake)

What do we think?

If you are a serious PC gamer, a computer designer or artist, or run gene sequencing algorithms, an effective cooler is a must. Thumbs up for the MaxOrb.

But then …

So what about the noise problem? The AIB’s were causing the noise and indeed their fan speed is temperature dependant. After installing a great program called ATI Tray Tools I found with much surprise that my GPU chips were touching on 80 degrees Celsius at max load (twice my CPU temp). This had a drastic effect on performance in games and of course made the card fans work incredibly hard.

The only solution I found for the noise was to use ATI Tray Tools to command the AIB fan to run at a slightly slower speed when the card is at max load. This eliminates the noise but obviously further hurts the heat and processing speed; not to mention it voids your warranty. So I turned off the fan speed manipulator and am now back to the annoying sound during prolonged peak gaming sessions.

Hopefully AMD is working on cooling their cards more effectively and perhaps they are as I had no noise problems with the R600’s. Judging from my experience, max temp at peak load should never exceed 70 degrees.

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