ZEROtherm Nirvana: Designed for Top Performance
by Wesley Fink on January 16, 2008 5:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
Conclusion
Our industry seems to be one filled with superlatives. Each new product name sounds as if it came through a marketing group looking for another name that signifies the top, the best, the super-duper whatever. After a while, you become numb to what names really mean since the performance reality is often quite different from the incredible performance promised by most product names.
Even in that environment, using the name Nirvana takes guts. Fortunately for ZEROtherm, the performance of the Nirvana NV120 is deserving of its name. For silence purists, however, the Nirvana is not as successful. Its best performance is achieved at the expense of noise that will be too high for many, although silence can be achieved by turning down the fan speed with the included fan controller. The problem of course is silent operation still pays a performance price, and there are several other coolers tested that strike a better balance between silence and performance.
That does not change in any way the fact that the ZEROtherm Nirvana belongs on the short list of top performing coolers. It is in the same league as the top Thermalright offerings, the Tuniq Tower, and the Scythe Infinity with push-pull fans. In fact, at a street price of around $45 the Nirvana is also one of the best values in the top-performing air cooler category.
The ZEROtherm Nirvana shines as an incredibly efficient cooler for users who will not overclock to extreme levels. In this environment, users can dial down the fan to low speed and the cooler can still provide some of the best cooling ever measured in our cooler tests.
At the top of the cooler pyramid the Nirvana still competes very well in both performance and silence by running the fan at around 2000RPM. However, performance here is a compromise. The Nirvana at 2000RPM falls slightly behind several top coolers that are as quiet as or quieter than the 2000RPM Nirvana. At the lowest fan speed the Nirvana is effectively silent, but overclocking tops out at around 3.78 GHz, which is quite a compromise from the top performance at high fan speeds.
What all of this is saying is that the ZEROtherm is an incredibly flexible cooler. With the fan cranked up it can compete with the best in cooling performance, and with the fan cranked down it can compete with the quietest solutions you can buy. Unfortunately it can't do both exceptionally well at the same time. With a non-upgradeable fan what we measured is what you get and that is certainly very good performance. However, to really top our performance charts ZEROtherm needs to improve the noise levels of the integrated fan. Output is great and competitive, but noise levels need some improvement.
The ZEROtherm Nirvana NV120 belongs in the list of top air coolers. It can compete with anything available and it is a great value. However, it can't do both performance and low noise at the same time as well as some of its competitors. Having said that, the Nirvana is still one of the best air coolers you can buy and it is selling at a very fair price.
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Spanki - Thursday, January 17, 2008 - link
Nice review.Was the Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme's top overclock (3.94GHz) achieved with one SFlex SFF21F fan? Or two? On a retail cooler? Or a lapped and/or mount-modded one? It would help if you listed the fan(s) used in all tests/charts. Is it safe to assume one fan, unless you specifically state otherwise?
Aside from that, I agree with an earlier poster - a rise-over-meaured-ambient at the time of test would be a much better indicater when we're talking about 1-3C differences in coolers these days.
Amuro - Wednesday, January 16, 2008 - link
Are you sure those are Core Temp readings? They look like Tcase temps to me. I mean the stock Intel cooler idle @ 31C? That's incredible.I compared them to these articles of yours from a year ago, where you used Nvidia Monitor to messure the Tcase temps:
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2937&p...">http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2937&p...
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2943&p...">http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2943&p...
Wesley Fink - Thursday, January 17, 2008 - link
Those are the CoreTemp readings, which provide a temp reading for each core of the X6800. The results are very consistnet and repeatable across our tests, but they can NOT be compared to earlier nVidia utility readings. The CoreTemp readings are much lower than the nVidia readings, but they are consistent acrss test platforms.Amuro - Thursday, January 17, 2008 - link
That is weird. Core temps (Tjunction) are supposed to be higher than BIOS temps (Tcase). The difference between Tcase and Tjunction should be 15C or +- 3 degress for a C2D dual core, or 10C for a quad core.Amuro - Thursday, January 17, 2008 - link
That is weird. Core temps (Tjunction) temps are supposed to be higher than BIOS temps (Tcase). The difference between Tcase and Tjunction should be 15C or +- 3 degress with C2D dual cores, or 10C for a quad core.Amuro - Thursday, January 17, 2008 - link
That is weird. Core temps (Tjunction) temps are supposed to be higher than BIOS temps (Tcase). The difference between Tcase and Tjunction should be 15C or +- 3 degress with C2D dual cores, or 10C for a quad core.Amuro - Thursday, January 17, 2008 - link
That is weird. Core temps (Tjunction) temps are supposed to be higher than BIOS temps (Tcase). The difference between Tcase and Tjunction should be 15C or +- 3 degress with C2D dual cores, or 10C for a quad core.coolingwine - Wednesday, January 16, 2008 - link
Wesley - always like your analysis.But, what would be really useful is a performance (temp) to noise ratio chart. And make this standard in future analyses.
As you know, there is typically trade-off between temp and noise, much like price/performance. I may be willing to give a little on the OC potential (which is a factor of temp, all things except the HSF being equal) if the noise is less.
Just a thought....
soydeedo - Sunday, January 20, 2008 - link
I second this idea. I find myself swapping between the noise/temp pages constantly to get a better overall picture of cooling performance.PolymerTim - Wednesday, January 16, 2008 - link
Thanks for the great review. I really like how these reviews examine a large variety of coolers from different perspectives (idle/load, with/without OC, noise, etc). I was thinking a bit about the data and had a couple of thoughts/suggestions.I see in your test configuration that ambient temperature is maintained between 20-22 C. It seems to me that a 2 degree range can be important in some of the tests such as idle tests. At stock idle, half of the coolers fall into a 2 C range. I wonder if it is possible to record the actual ambient temperature during testing and then plot increase from ambient for each cooler. I think this could give a little more accuracy to the comparisons.
A minor detail along the same lines; I think it is unnecessary to start the scaling graphs at 0 C. I think a lot of blank space could be saved by starting at 20 C. What do you guys think? Also, maybe this is data overkill, but I would be curious to know the temperature of each cooler at the max stable OC.
-Tim