Kingwin HTC XT-1264 i7 Ready CPU Cooler Review

Testing

I compared the Kingwin XT-1264 with two other coolers I have for LGA 1366, a Noctua NH-U12P with LGA 1366 kit, and a Zalman CNPS 9900LED. These happen to be two of the most expensive air coolers currently on the market, at $75 and $70 respectively. For all three coolers I checked idle and load temps at stock clock. For monitoring I used Gigabyte’s Easy Tune 6, which is their software overclocking and monitoring utility. For attaining CPU load I used Everest’s System Stability Test, set only to CPU. Ambient room temperature was 73F.

graph1

Nothing really spectactular about the idle temp, you can never tell how a cooler is going to perform at load by how it does at idle. But the load temp was really surprising, 2C better than the Zalman, and a full 10C cooler than the Noctua.

Next I overclocked my i7 to 38.8C. In the process I bumped up both the Vcore and QPI/VTT voltage, which should warm up the CPU considerably.


Kingwin HTC XT-1264 i7 Ready CPU Cooler

graph2

At overclock load temps, the two more expensive coolers bridged the gap, but the Kingwin XT-1264 still beat the Noctua by 5C, and was behind the Zalman only by 6C. Why is that so surprising? Reread the sentence, Noctua and Zalman, names that are naturally associated with premium air coolers, did not blow away the Kingwin, a name that is naturally associated with economy products.

[ad#review999-bottom]