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ZEROtherm Nirvana NV120 Premium Review Hot

Hardware CPU/FAN

Written by admin

Wednesday, 16 January 2008

Page 2 of 2

Standard Performance

We first tested the heat sink/fan without any overclocking and used Coretemp to log the temperatures of the cores on our MESH Test PC.

The first temperature setting we captured was when our PC first booted up with no load and the fan speed was set to low. The readings were as follows 36 33 30 26 centigrade - each number representing each core.

After a few hours use, which involved a gaming sesh on Unreal 3, the temperatures only rose to the following 49 46 43 39 centigrade.

The next day we set the fan speed to high and logged its initial temperature at 34 27 31 23 and then again we recorded the temperature during a gaming sesh of Unreal 3.

The highest temperature that the CPU reached was 49 42 44 36 centigrade. But on average the first core was running at around 47.

As you can see there is not much difference between the fan speeds, but we did find that on the high fan speed it took 35minutes to reach the highest temperature, compared to 10minutes on the low fan settings. Either way the above results are impressive especially as the CPU never hit over 50 degrees and the product only costs £33.

Bear in mind we already have two 120mm fans installed in our case and the Intel CPU's are more efficient than the AMD CPU's.

Overclocking Performance

Overclocking is really dependant on a number of things, the quality of your existing cooling setup and motherboard.

And though we admit we are not experts in this field we did manage to increase the CPU up a touch.

First we used our ASUS P5N AI Overclocking setting and pushed the clock speed to 2.63GHZ from the default 2.4Ghz. We then performed the same tests as above but mainly set the fan to the higher speed to prevent any melt down effects.

At the start with no load the CPU recorded 38 27 32 35 degrees and then peaked at 52 44 45 48 after a gaming sesh on Unreal 3.

We then manually pushed the CPU even further to 2.75Ghz and recorded the temperature during another gaming sesh and found the CPU had peaked to a max of 55 47 46 39 centigrade, but most of the time it was only pushing an average of 52 on the first core.

In the end we did not attempt to push the CPU any further because we had come to the conclusion that on its high fan setting the ZEROtherm is extremely efficient at keeping the overclocked CPU cool.

In fact most of the results are similar to the non overclock tests, so we reckon that experienced Overclockers could push the CPU even higher with the Nirvana.

Editor review : Final thoughts

30 of 30 people found the following review helpful


Overall rating		8.6
Noise		7.0
Cooling		9.0
Ease of fit		9.0
Design		8.0
Value For Money		10.0

Another great CPU cooler from APACK/Zerotherm. On standard clock speeds the low fan setting was enough to keep our Quad CPU cool and for Overclocking we were impressed at how well the high-speed fan setting could efficiently keep the CPU running at low temperatures.

Overall a quality product at a great price.

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