Enzotech Ultra-X: If Looks Could Chill
by Wesley Fink on June 27, 2007 3:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
Cooling at Stock Speed
Some users will never overclock their CPU, but they still want to run the coolest CPU temperatures possible to enhance stability and extend CPU life. The Enzotech Ultra-X comes with a high-quality slot-mounted rheostat coupled to a high-output Delta fan. Therefore we tested the Ultra-X cooler with the supplied fan and rheostat.
Where the very good Intel stock cooler keeps the X6800 at 41C at idle, the Ultra-X manages 32C. This is a significant improvement over the Intel stock cooler performance, but the results are average at best. The Thermalright coolers, at the top of our heatpipe tower performance charts, cool to 26C and 27C, and the Tuniq 120 maintains 27C.
It is more difficult to effectively simulate a computer being stressed by all of the conditions it might be exposed to in different operating environments. For most home users CPU power is most taxed with contemporary gaming. Therefore our stress test simulates playing a demanding game.
The Far Cry River demo is looped for 30 minutes and the CPU temperature is captured at 4 second intervals with the NVIDIA Monitor "logging" option. The highest temperature during the load test is then reported. Momentary spikes are ignored, as we report a sustained high-level temp that you would expect to find in this recording configuration. This test configuration roughly equates to an 80% CPU load test using Intel TAT.
Cooling efficiency of the Enzotech Ultra-X is then compared under load conditions at stock speed to the retail HSF and other recently tested CPU coolers.
The Ultra-X under load at stock speeds reached a maximum temperature of 43C with the included fan at its highest speed. This compares to the Thermalrights at 32C and 33C, the Tuniq at 34C, and the Cooler Master Hyper 6+ and Zalman 9700 at 36C. Stock load performance is below average among tested coolers, a pattern we have consistently seen with downward-blowing designs.
Some users will never overclock their CPU, but they still want to run the coolest CPU temperatures possible to enhance stability and extend CPU life. The Enzotech Ultra-X comes with a high-quality slot-mounted rheostat coupled to a high-output Delta fan. Therefore we tested the Ultra-X cooler with the supplied fan and rheostat.
Where the very good Intel stock cooler keeps the X6800 at 41C at idle, the Ultra-X manages 32C. This is a significant improvement over the Intel stock cooler performance, but the results are average at best. The Thermalright coolers, at the top of our heatpipe tower performance charts, cool to 26C and 27C, and the Tuniq 120 maintains 27C.
It is more difficult to effectively simulate a computer being stressed by all of the conditions it might be exposed to in different operating environments. For most home users CPU power is most taxed with contemporary gaming. Therefore our stress test simulates playing a demanding game.
The Far Cry River demo is looped for 30 minutes and the CPU temperature is captured at 4 second intervals with the NVIDIA Monitor "logging" option. The highest temperature during the load test is then reported. Momentary spikes are ignored, as we report a sustained high-level temp that you would expect to find in this recording configuration. This test configuration roughly equates to an 80% CPU load test using Intel TAT.
Cooling efficiency of the Enzotech Ultra-X is then compared under load conditions at stock speed to the retail HSF and other recently tested CPU coolers.
The Ultra-X under load at stock speeds reached a maximum temperature of 43C with the included fan at its highest speed. This compares to the Thermalrights at 32C and 33C, the Tuniq at 34C, and the Cooler Master Hyper 6+ and Zalman 9700 at 36C. Stock load performance is below average among tested coolers, a pattern we have consistently seen with downward-blowing designs.
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homonaut - Wednesday, June 27, 2007 - link
I was contemplating getting one of these after stumbling onto this 'review': http://www.coolaler.com/modules/news/article.php?s...">http://www.coolaler.com/modules/news/article.php?s... but now I don't know. How can the results be so different!?SilthDraeth - Wednesday, June 27, 2007 - link
Since I don't speak Chinese or Korean, etc, all I could do was look at the pictures. It is unclear what temps are load or not.Also, they use different processors. Anand uses a 6800 vs a 6600.
They both post a 43 degree celcius temp, on Anand thats a load temp at stock speed, so that might be load on the coolaler site. and the lower temps might be idel temps for the 6600.
idle temp might have been taken at a different time frame for how long the processor was running before the temperature was taken, etc.
The temps do not look to be a huge disparity though imo.
Wesley Fink - Wednesday, June 27, 2007 - link
The Enzotech could boot as high as 3.90 GHz, which is as good as any of the best coolers tested except the Ultra-120 eXtrme which reaches a stable 3.94GHz. All was fine at idle at 3.9GHz, but as soon as we began our stress testing with the game that is about 80% CPU load the system would fail with the Enzothec. This was with the fan on high, near 90 cfm at a pretty loud noise level. We could not even make it through one loop of the game demo, and our stress test procedure runs the game loop for 30 minutes to test load stability.We also tried adding a high output case can as some readers have suggested. This DID lower the CPU temperature, particularly at stock speed strangely enough, however it did not extend overclocking ability at all.