Testing
[ad#content_main]After booting the rig, I first checked the noise level of the Cooler Master Hyper N620. I used the BIOS to determine CPU fan speed, as most will, the fan was silent. The fans both have blue LEDs. As the frames of the fans are black plastic, the fans themselves didn’t light up, they merely gave a nice blue glow to the radiator.
I compared the N620 with a couple of upper-end air coolers that I had at hand, the Tuniq Tower 120 Extreme, and Zalman’s CNPS 10X Extreme. Both of these coolers are in the basic price range of the N620, though they are both more expensive, so I consider all three of them in the same class. Earlier testing showed that the two comparison coolers give similar performance.
Temperatures were measured with Lavalys Everest Ultimate and Gigabyte’s ET6. (they both always gave the same CPU temp, I just wanted to make sure) Idle temperatures were taken after the system sat idle for 30 minutes. CPU 100% load was attained by running “Torture Test” from the latest version of Prime95, which not only loads all four of the i7’s cores, but also fully loads the four virtual cores. I used the “Large FFTs” which causes the i7 to generate the most heat. Ambient room temperature for all testing was 70F.
At stock clock the Hyper N620 was right there with the other coolers. But as always, the real performance of a CPU cooler is determined at overclock.
I overclocked the i7 920 to 3.86gHz. This isn’t my highest overclock with that CPU, but it is a very healthy overclock that requires the Vcore and QPI voltage to be raised considerably, which causes the CPU to generate a lot of heat. I’ve had coolers that exceeded shutdown temperature at that overclock.
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