Usage

After closing my case back up, I was surprised at how quiet the fan is when the computer is only idling. Of course, leaving your computer transcoding video while you sleep in the same room won't be anywhere near as pleasant. You have been warned.

We compared temperatures against the stock Intel Heatsink that comes with their Quad Core processors. After installation was over, we let the heatsink settle in by looping a full Linux Kernel compile run for 2 days straight.

We ran two sets of tests on both Linux and Windows to find the temperature of the processor at both idle and under load. In Windows, we used CoreTemp to measure CPU core temperatures, and a frontend of LM_SENSORS in Linux.

First, we'll look at our results in Windows. The system is running a BFG 8800GTX videocard, 2GB of Ballistix Tracer RAM, and an Intel Q6600 Processor. To load the processor, we played back a movie in iTunes while playing Unreal Tournament 3 with the highest settings. In Linux, we compiled the latest Linux kernel and the KDE4.0 source code at the same time with the make option of "-j5". "-j5" will create a maximum of 5 simultaneous threads at the same time for the processor, and since we're running a quad core processor, this should fill up the full computing power. Let's see where the numbers fell.

Heatsink	Windows Idle (°C per core)	Windows Load (°C per core)	Linux Idle (°C per core)	Linux Load (°C per core)
Stock Intel	49 - 48 - 46 - 46	59 - 58 - 55 - 56	45 - 45 - 43 - 44	59 - 59 - 54 - 56
Xigmatek HDT-S1283	35 - 35 - 33 - 33	43 - 42 - 38 - 38	34 - 36 - 32 - 33	43 - 43 - 39 - 38

The HDT-S1283 knocked our processors temperatures by a whopping 13°C while idle, and 16°C while under load! This is a true improvement over Intel's stock heatsink. I did notice that while under load, the fan got considerably louder, much like how loud it was when it was connected directly to a molex connector.

It can also be noted that the idle temperatures are lower for Linux than Vista. My best guess it that it's Vista's fault this is so. Vista simply uses more resources to function, unlike Linux that uses the bare necessities.