Tuniq Tower 120: Air Cooling to the Max
by Wesley Fink on January 15, 2007 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
Noise
Improved cooling and higher overclocks often come with additional noise. For some users the goal is maximum stable overclock, and they will live with the inconvenience of a louder system. For others silence is the most important factor, and these users will forgo overclocking if this increases system noise levels.Fortunately, both the stock Intel retail HSF and the Tuniq Tower 120 pay serious attention to the noise factor. Intel uses a low speed 80mm fan that runs at about 1100 RPM under normal operating conditions. The Tuniq Tower 120 uses a massive 120mm 9-blade fan that moves a lot of air and that can be manually adjusted between 1000 and 2100 RPM.
It should be pointed out that the fan speeds reported by NVIDIA Monitor are double the actual fan speeds. Fan speeds were measured and confirmed with the well-known SpeedFan, which is a free download. SpeedFan confirmed the adjustment range of the Tuniq Tower 120 to be 1000 RPM to 2100 RPM, which is just a bit better than the specified 1000 to 2000 RPM.
In looking at noise measurements, the test environment was first considered. The noise floor in the test room, with all computers and fans off, is 36.4dB. There are also virtually no power supplies that do not have a fan. While Zalman and perhaps others make expensive fanless PSUs, we are not aware of one that is larger than 500W, or that would be used for seriously overclocking a system. With that in mind the noise level of the system with all fans turned off except the power supply was measured. The power supply used for the cooling test bed was the OCZ PowerStream 520, which is one of the quieter high performance power supplies. The noise level of the power supply was 38.3dB from 24" (61cm) and 47dB from 6" (152mm).
Measured noise levels in this chart should be considered worst case. Measurements were taken from an open side of a mid tower case 6" from the open HSF and 24" from the open HSF. Real world would be a completely closed case with a further reduction in noise.
The Intel retail HSF and the Tuniq Tower 120 at the 1000RPM setting were below the system noise floor at all tested speeds. That means they produced noise levels that were below the noise already produced by the quiet OCZ 520w power supply.
As already pointed out the Tuniq Tower 120 comes with a rheostat for adjusting fan speed from 1000 to 2100 RPM. At 1000 RPM the Tuniq can be considered as good as silent, but noise does go up as fan speed is manually increased. At the highest speed from 24" away the Tuniq measured 48dB compared to the system "floor" of 38.3dB. At a 6" distance the difference was 54dB to 47dB. Keep in mind that the dB scale is logarithmic and not linear, so a 3dB increase represents a doubling of sound power. Some studies suggest that while the human ear can discern small differences in sound level, the human ear perceives a doubling of loudness at a 10dB increase. Others quote double the sound level as 6db. In either case the increased noise of the Tuniq at 2100 RPM will definitely be noticeable to almost any user.
In most cases the 1000 RPM setting of the Tuniq Tower 120 will cool very adequately and sat very low noise levels. We found no difference in cooling with 1000 or 2100 RPM up to 3.73GHz. Above this point the higher 2100 speed cooled about 2C to 5C cooler than the 1000 low-speed setting. The system still topped out at 3.9GHz on low speed, but at a bit higher temperatures. This, of course, is with the Core 2 Duo processor, which runs rather cool. Your results with other CPUs will vary from this.
In the end whether you choose silence or maximum cooling with a bit more noise is up to you. With the adjustable fan speed you can dial in what is tolerable to you - from silence to some noise but a bit better cooling. It is worth mentioning that noise remained below the system noise floor until a speed of about 1600 RPM was reached. Above that speed noise increased rapidly.
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EWAXMAN - Sunday, January 6, 2008 - link
TO WHOM THIS MAY CONCERN,
I WOULD LIKE TO SEE A TEST RUN ON THE "ASUS TRITON 77 CPU COOLING FAN" COMPARED TO: THE TUNIQ TOWER 120, THE ZALMAN 9500 LED, AND THE ZALMAN 9700 LED - FOR OVERCLOCKING PURPOSES.
TESTED ON AN INTEL DUAL CORE CPU's 1.86 GHZ 65nm's AND UP, FOR COOLING, EASE OF INSTALLATION, PLUS NOISE FACTOR AS WELL.
THANK YOU IN ADVANCE, FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION, TIME, AND HELP.
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EWAXMAN
EWAXMAN - Sunday, January 6, 2008 - link
I WOULD LIKE TO SEE A TEST RUN ON THE "ASUS TRITON 77 CPU COOLING FAN" COMPARED TO: THE TUNIQ TOWER 120, THE ZALMAN 9500 LED, AND THE ZALMAN 9700 LED - FOR OVERCLOCKING PURPOSES.TESTED ON AN INTEL DUAL CORE CPU's 1.86 GHZ 65nm's AND UP, FOR COOLING, EASE OF INSTALLATION, PLUS NOISE FACTOR AS WELL.
THANK YOU IN ADVANCE, FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION, TIME, AND HELP.
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EWAXMAN
LoneWolf15 - Wednesday, January 17, 2007 - link
Maybe I missed it...were the temperature results for the Tuniq tower obtained with the fan on minimum or maximum RPM?orion23 - Tuesday, January 16, 2007 - link
So Anandtech, I mean, Anandtech reviews this great cooler and the test that was run compares it to Intel's stock cooler?And the load temperatures are taken from a game and not Orthos, or the well know Prime95?
And what happened, You guys couldn't get a Zalman or Thermalright Cooler to test the tuniq against?
What is wrong with Anandtech?
Jodiuh - Tuesday, January 16, 2007 - link
Most folks use Core Temp to monitor temps since it works the same across all boards. As it stands, only 680i users can compare.And why not use Orthos, the OCer's fav testing tool? It gets temps up pretty high and lets us know how stable a system is.
PrinceGaz - Tuesday, January 16, 2007 - link
You reported the temperatures at stock (2.93GHz) and at 3.73GHz for the standard cooler and the Tuniq Tower 120, and also at 3.83 and 3.9GHz for the TT120, but was the CPU running at the same core-voltage for all these different speeds? Presumably it was running at stock voltage for the stock speed run, so was 3.73GHz and 3.9GHz the maximum it could reach at stock voltage with the two heatsinks, or was the voltage increased (and by how much) to reach those speeds?For pure temperature comparisons between HSFs, keeping the voltage the same is obviously a must. However if the voltage was kept at stock (or at the same raised voltage) for determining the maximum overclock then you are probably missing out on a major advantage of a better cooler which is that you can crank the voltage up somewhat higher and still have a safe temperature.
Overclocking a CPU generally consists of seeing how fast it is stable at, then add a bit more voltage and see how much further it goes (while watching the temps), then a bit more voltage, and so on until the temperature reaches the highest you are happy with. The better HSF will allow a higher voltage to be used and that will usually translate to a higher overclock. Okay, so the overclocked temperature may be just as high with the better HSF when you use that approach, but it should provide a better indication of how much higher you can overclock the CPU with it.
Jiggz - Monday, January 15, 2007 - link
With it's monstrous size and weight, you would think they will design something for a vertically oriented mobo; which by the way most of us have.monsoon - Monday, January 15, 2007 - link
Does anyone know about a good / slick / cheap ( any of those criteria is welcome ) CASE where to install HORIZONTALLY a regular ATX MoBo so that I don't have to worry about the weight of the cooler ?THANKS !=)
Axbattler - Monday, January 15, 2007 - link
Though it is a little redundant (given that I don't see people mounting AMD fans on Intel chips and vice-versa), I am a little curious how well the AMD Stock fan compares to the Tuniq tower, and by association, how well it compares to the Intel.I remember that AMD's heatpipe cooler, used in the Dual-Core Opteron (and probably some other chips) have been very well regarded in various reviews. At the time, it was often thought that AMD's stock cooling solution was a good few steps ahead of Intels. Of course, it is hard to tell if part of the reason may not have been with the sheer amount of heat generated by those P4s, which is why I am curious how the two compares today.
Araemo - Monday, January 15, 2007 - link
I'd guess that that "good" dual core opteron heatpipe heatsink is a good unit. I purchased one in the FT/FS forums after I got my Opteron 148 (Single core, standard A64 heatsink), and with nothing but a little AS5, it was able to get my Opteron stable at 2.4 Ghz(over 1.8) with almost no extra voltage (I was only able to add 0.05V over the stock on my motherboard).That all said.. good luck getting a fair comparison with the Core 2 duo heatsinks.. You can't mount them on AMD and you can't mount the AMD(Socket 939) cooler on Intel(LGA775), as far as I can recall. I seem to recall that a few years back Anandtech(I think it was AT anyways.. I could be mistaken) built a 'cpu simulator' that had little metal ingots with heaters and temperature probes embedded to do apples-to-apples heatsink testing... I wonder if that's a realistic option for this roundup?