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Live Testing

Performance Results Using Evolution Two Pump

When we first started looking at one of these types of companion cooler with our Shuttle box conversion we had in mind to provide a compact cooling solution for mobile users. As we mentioned in the body of the project ease of breakdown for transportation was important but not at the expense of performance. We also considered weight as a valid factor so light weight parts were required to make movement to Lan's easier.

The last consideration was a neat and easily modified configuration using small bore tubing. The no fuss approach of simply unsnapping a shut off connector to isolate the liquid cooling in both parts of the system, that is radiator, pumps and fans from the CPU and GPU blocks, has really raised the bar for water cooling design. For those fearful of leaks all the cooing parts can be tested outside of the computer case and fitted only when the system is found to be leak free.

Results

So how did we go with our Tribal Conversion. .........What we have got is a bit of a giant killer. More of that later lets look at the test unit.

GPU Testing

We have added our prototype Radiical GPU block into the mix so let us have a look at the GPU block performance first. We used Nvidia's 7600GT card for our video block testing. The 7600GT is a hot little card and was chosen for those attributes.

Standard air cooling on a Nvidia7600GT card give the following results;

Ambient 25 degrees
Air Cooled at IDLE 53 degrees
Air Cooled at LOAD (single run 3dMark05) 63 Degrees.

Water cooled the picture changes quite dramatically. First and most importantly no more sound of a jet engine with a damaged rotor blade assaulting your ear drums. Then in the quiet that follows the change to water cooling a significant drop in temperatures is observed.

Ambient 25.6 degrees
Water Cooled at IDLE 31.7 degrees
Water Cooled at LOAD (ten repetitions of the full 3DMARK05 suite at all default settings) 39.6 degrees

Due to the increased heat input capacity of the Nvidia 7600GT card we can observe some changes of system wide temperatures when the video testing is conducted. Overall motherboard temperature readings rose during these tests from the idle temperature by a further 6 degrees during the ten repetition runs of the 3DMARK05 full suite.

We then ran several hours of game play using Doom3 and BF2 to simulate a protracted gaming period. Resultant temperatures at the GPU core were less than those obtained using 3DMark05 testing so these results have not been included here.

System and Live Testing.

The system testing program we used was Folding@Home. This program creates a heat stress within the system. Folding@Home has also been found to identify any system insatiability in the CPU function and rate of overclocking.

No other changes were made following on from the GPU block testing to the live testing configuration shown on the web page and here during the final test runs for this series of testing.

Results;

Idle to ambient Delta was found to average 4 degrees.

Load to ambient Delta was found to average 11 degrees

The temperature results were quite linear simply tracking the ambient during the period of testing. We attempted to run 3DMARK05 during Folding@Home to add in an additional GPU load as well but the software was resource incompatible and failed to run on this machine.

Conclusion;

Overall we are happy with the Tribal Conversion results. In something of a "zero to hero" progression what was an under performing cooling system has been raised to a level which would match and pass many cooling systems out there.

The next series of tests will be conducted using a pump with higher head pressure and flow rate to see if we can raise the bar that little bit higher.

Stay Tuned.

Copyright of Radiical Pty Ltd 2006