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Installation and Benchmarks
I must admit that installing the 2CoolPC Turbo is easy enough for my dog to install. Simply take the three velco pads and stick them on the bottom of the device. When you put it in place the other half of the velcro will stick to the case and remain there assuming you don't have a half inch of dust carpeting the case bottom. In fact, I found that using the device seemed to turn my case into a vacuum bag, collecting unheard of amounts of dust on the fan blades and in the fins of my heatsink. Now plug in the familiar molex power connector and close up your baby. The cooler fit nice and snug in my Enlight EN-7230 17" mid-tower case blocking the stock side vent slots, but the other case I was going to test in proved to be too snug and the cover could not be put back on. The other case, which I think was an In-win, had taller SCSI and SoundBlaster Live! 5.1 cards which left the duct bulging out the case side. This computer could have really used the extra cooling too as the motherboard temp is usually 38 celcius, thats right, not cpu but motherboard.
For testing I used my everyday system with Hardware Monitor Pro keeping tabs on the temps. Hardware Monitor has a cpu idle feature that I turned off for testing and I used CPU Stability Test to heat things up from idle.
| System Settings |
| Processor |
AMD K6-2 400 @ 420 |
| Motherboard |
Asus P5A |
| RAM |
64MB PC100 SDRAM |
| Hard Drive/s |
Maxtor 8.4GB 5400RPM
Western Digital 2.5GB 5400RPM |
| Video Card |
VisionTek GeForce2 GTS 32 MB DDR |
| Operating System |
Windows 2000 Professional |
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2CoolPC Turbo |
2CoolPC Plus |
No Device |
| Idle |
42.5 C |
43 C |
44.5 C |
| Load |
47.5 C |
47 C |
48.5 C |
As you can tell this computer is nothing extravagant and it's normal temps at idle are rather vanilla. I didn't put motherboard temps in the chart simply because they stayed at a constant 25 to 26 C no matter what cooling I used. As for fan noise, the difference between my normal 3 80mm fans and adding the Turbo wasn't even noticeable, so fear not the noise police.
Since these numbers didn't seem all that exciting, I now unhooked all the extra fans in my case leaving the cpu and power supply fans only. With this round of tests I found that with my fans silenced, the Turbo was indeed a little louder than the Plus. Things were pretty scary as I watched my idle temp rise to 50 C and I wasn't sure I wanted to load the cpu, but since AMD K6-2's are cheap I went for it. Now thats more like it, a four degree celsius drop simply by adding one fan, but the Turbo still behaves identically to the Plus. Still, one single fan/duct has pretty much replaced two fans with only a two degree increase in average motherboard and cpu temps to show for it.
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2CoolPC Turbo |
2CoolPC Plus |
No Device |
| Idle |
45.5 C |
46 C |
50 C |
| Load |
49.5 C |
49.5 C |
54.5 C |
>> The Verdict
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