HWC Heatsink Reviews. Need Your Input

[SKYMTL]

- open stand
- a cool Nehalem

No to the first one.

And the second one is impossible. We are played the cards we were dealt. We have a cool-running 920 and that is that.

[MpG]

Originally Posted by burebista

If you really want to be useful for average Joe then try to be as close as possible to his real life conditions.

What I don't want to see
- low ambient temperatures
- open stand
- a cool Nehalem

I know that is time consuming but it will be as close as possible to everyone who has a computer and wants to change his stock cooling.

Burebista, I think your quest for "real life" conditions is a little misguided in some ways. While it can be argued that an open bench isn't representative of the average person's setup, what is? Single fan, front and back? A fan front, back, and top? Top doing intake or exhaust? PSU just above the heatsink or at the bottom of the case? Multiple fans on intake? 120, 92 or 80mm sizes? Video cards helping to exhaust? Video cards blocking airflow? Filters? These sort of factors will all skew how well heatsinks perform.

Seriously, doing this sort of testing in a computer case would ultimately make the results LESS useful.

And for the ambient temperature issue, there have been people that have tested and found that i7 temps scale linearly with ambient temps. And in any case, the heatsinks' comparative performance isn't going to suddenly change if the ambient goes up a few degrees.

[burebista]

IMO from 20°C open stand to at least 30°C in case closed plus a cold Nehalem will be far away from real life.
As for case a good old setup with one intake and one exhaust 120 mm fan @ max 1000 RPM is more than enough for at least 90% of computer users.
Anyway I understand from SKY that it will be a cold Nehalem and open stand so that's it. It will be another synthetic review like another gazillions around the web.
At least it will be from a trusty source: HWC.

[chrisk]

I voted yes. Still think that AMD should be represented though, so I am happy to see that Sky will be loving those too.

[ebdoradz]

my last 6-7 rigs were amd, so i want to see AMD test has well

[DaleF]

My Xeons are rather cool running, until I turn my case fans down to heat things up. Stock Xeon coolers work reasonably well, so getting cool running Nehalems aren't that hard...

[dinmaster]

p6t, has holes for but sockets

[krazyups]

Originally Posted by MpG

The heatsink's ability to dissipate the heat is only half the battle - it needs to get the heat from the CPU in the first place, and this is arguably the harder part. Artificial heaters largely ignore this aspect,which makes that kind of testing worse, imo.

I suppose you could always get a fried i7 chip, remove the IHS and solder it to the artificial load, that could make it very controllable and repeatable, with it leaning a little more towards real world scenario. It wouldn't be perfect, but it would be close, and that way you could monitor the temperatures all over, on the artificial load, on the IHS and somewhere on the heatsink or the exhaust air if needed.

-Steve

[SKYMTL]

One more heatsink review will be posted after which we will be using the new methodology so make your votes count now or forever hold your peace. ;)

[bojangles]

Wow. I'm actually amazed how many people still want 775 chips in the review. IDK SKY, perhaps you should leave them in until maybe a couple months after i5 is released...