Testing
I set the fan speed in the BIOS at 6, where the fan is running at around 60% when the CPU reaches 70C. I never heard the fan during any of the testing, even with the side panel off. The rig is very quiet and the Hyper 212 Plus added no additional noise. Later I set the fan to run at 100%. I still couldn’t hear it over the case fans.
First I tested the Hyper 212 Plus with the CPU at stock clock. Idle temp was tested with the rig sitting idle for 30 minutes. Load temp was tested with the rig running Prime95, Large FFTs, for 30 minutes. The latest version of Prime95 is excellent for this, instead of having to run multiple instances of Prime95 as you had to do in the past, when you launch the stress test, eight instances (one per CPU thread) of the utility open at the same time. I’ve checked with the task manager, all eight threads are maxed out the entire time Prime95 is running.
All four cores and all eight threads were enabled, Turbo Boost and SpeedStep were disabled. Temps were monitored by ASRock OC Tuner, ASRock’s hardware monitor/overclock utility. Ambient room temperature for all testing was 72F.
Next I overclocked the i7 860 to 4.2gHz. This isn’t the max overclock, but it is the highest that I’ve overclocked this processor so far, a 40.8% overclock. I raised the Vcore from 1.2v to 1.43v, which should heat things up a bit. Testing was performed as described above.
