CoolIT Domino A.L.C CPU Cooler Review

E4600 Performance Testing

As you can see the Domino certainly has the potential for high performance. As with most things in life this performance comes at a price: namely the full speed “High” setting is loud. It is actually hard to quantify whether or not the Freezone Elite’s 38mm thick Panaflo is louder or not as the noise characteristics are much smoother with that fan, with most of the noise coming from “wind noise”. Indeed, when you contrast that very, very good Panaflo with the Domino’s fan, the Domino looses hands down. This 25mm thick fan produces a very pronounced whine-like sound which was easily heard at greater distances than the Elite’s. On the positive side this mildly annoying characteristic is only present when the unit is in full speed mode and only when in a case with ultra quiet fans.

In performance mode this fan will be inaudible in most cases. In this mode it stayed very docile throughout the testing phase but it did cause higher temperatures. However, this only tells half the story as the unit did take a while to ramp up to its eventual operating RPM speed and thus temperature scores did suffer. We are positive if the testing had been a half hour (or longer) test the difference between the full speed mode and the much quieter “performance” mode would have not have been as severe. While silent mode is not listed in these tests (it will be covered later in the review) the Domino certainly lived up to this mode's name as it was inaudible even in an open bench environment!

This unit covers a wide gamut of possibilities and depending upon your needs, one of these three settings should cover it. All in all, the Domino was a very well behaved, yet powerful cooler which easily beats both its predecessor the PURE and the Asetek LLC in both adaptability and shear performance potential. Unfortunately, it doesn't compete very well versus top-end air coolers.