Part 2: the Titan Copper Cooler
        |
Well, after a good year of driving me steadily crazy, I finally snapped. A
house move and new room meant the PC had to move up from the floor and onto the
desk beside me; the extra noise from the proximity pushed me over the edge.
This PC is was just too loud! Read on to find out how I sorted
it out...
You might like to read Part 1 of this series of articles, which covers the beginnings of my quest to shut my PC up.
| The BlueOrb |
|
In addition to the general whirring and humming coming from my PC, it started to make an irregular grinding noise which would go on for a few seconds, then stop. This is generally a sign of a fan that needs oiling or is about to die. The simple measure of sticking my head in the case while it was running (don't try this at home, kids!) ascertained it was the BlueOrb to blame. Now, before I go ragging on other people's products, I should point out that
there has been an unfiltered 120mm inlet fan pointing at it for well over a
year, and it's just a little bit dusty...
Having said that, I was never really happy with this cooler in the first place. Although it was both effective and pretty, the high-pitched whine from its high speed fan was very grating, and to my ears a good deal louder than Thermaltake's claimed 26dB(A). Also, its chunky size means you lose the use of the PCI slot next to it. I have a second graphics card, SCSI card, network card and SBLive! in my four remaining slots, which means I have a TV tuner card going completely unused because I have no more slots left (stupid Asus A7V motherboard only has five slots). Then I ran across a reference to the Titan Copper Cooler. Reviews (I'll link to them later) suggested this was a pretty good piece of kit; as effective a cooler as the BlueOrb, a lot smaller (thus freeing up a PCI slot), and a bit quieter too. |
| Fitting the Titan Copper Cooler |
 What you get for your hard-earned cash. As you can see, the Titan Copper Cooler comes in its component parts. The
basic design is of a spring clip that straps across the solid copper (and
impressively weighty) heatsink and clips into the holes drilled through most
graphics cards. The fan is then screwed in to the heatsink over the top of the
clip. The positions of the holes through the graphics cards varies from make to
make, so the kit comes with three different clips of different length to allow
for this.
First stage is to remove the Blue Orb and clean off the Artic Silver goop I
used when fitting it with some isopropyl alcohol and cotton wool buds (Q-tips
to you Merkins).
With that done, it's the work of a few minutes to spread some of the silver
grease supplied with the Copper Cooler onto the chip, place the heatsink on
top, and slot one of the supplied spring clips into place.
The fan simply screws in to the top of the heatsink. There is a small gap in
the fins on the side of the sink for the wires powering the fan to run through.
Finally, the card is put in the machine. Note that the first PCI slot is not blocked, unlike with the Blue Orb. |
| Copper Cooler performance |
|
I was interested in two things about how well the Copper Cooler performed compared to the BlueOrb: noise, and cooling. Noise is pretty easy to test when the measuring equipment you're using is your ears. I was very pleasantly surprised by the Copper Cooler; on paper, it's only a very little bit quieter than the BlueOrb (24dB(A) versus 26) but to my ears, it's a big improvement. I think Thermaltake might have been a little generous with their rating. Now, I'm a strictly small time operator, and I can't afford all these fancy schmancy temperature measurement probes that proper overclocking sites use. So I used the only method I could think of to test how well this slab of copper cools - overclocking stability. I overclocked my Geforce 1 DDR to 150Mhz (up from 100Mhz stock speed) and looped 3dMark2001 for an hour or so. Both the BlueOrb and the Copper Cooler were up to this task, running without any crashes or visual defects. As the Geforce 1 is a very hot-running chip at the best of times, and especially when overclocked that far, I think that's pretty impressive. |
| Verdict |
|
The Titan Copper Cooler is an excellent thing indeed. It's small enough to not block a PCI slot, quiet enough to not drive you mad, and performs well enough to let you overclock your graphics card. It's also pretty cheap. |
| Links |
|
Other reviews: PC Power Zone, Overclocker Cafe Buying a Titan Copper Cooler: 2CoolTek (US), The Cooling Shop (UK). |
| PC quietening |
|
You might like to Go back to
article 1 in this series or go on
to article 3.
|