Socket-A & Socket-370 Cooler Roundup - November 2000

Fan performance

To find out whether a heatsink design is good, the performance measurement alone is not enough - very interesting is the question: how much air flow does a heatsink require to reach its peak performance? If two heatsinks with different fans have identical cooling performance, the one with the weaker fan clearly has the superior heatsink design, since it requires less airflow to reach the same performance as its competitor. We didn't want to trust the air volume specifications from the fan manufacturers, so we measured fan air speed ourselves. For this test, we used a Lutron AM-402 aneometer adapter. The fans were uninstalled from the heatsinks, and air speed was measured 3 cm away from the fan, to avoid inaccuracies due to air turbulences right behind the fan blades.

Heatsink/fan	Air speed
Kanie Hedgehog-238M Delta 60x25mm fan	9.2 m/s
Global WIN FOP38 Delta 60x25mm fan w/grille	9.0 m/s
Kanie Hedgehog-238M YS Tech 60x25 fan	5.7 m/s
Alpha PAL6035 YS Tech 60x25 fan	5.7 m/s
Global WIN FOP32 YS Tech 60x25mm fan	5.7 m/s
Taisol CGK742092 Delta 60x10mm fan	4.7 m/s
Alpha PAL6035 Sanyo Denki 60x25mm fan	4.3 m/s
Cooler Master  DP5-5K11 50x10mm Delta (1)	2.8 m/s
JMC (RDJD) Arctic Breeze Plus JMC proprietary 60x15mm (2)	1.2 m/s min 3.9 m/s max
Thermaltake "Super Orb" Thermaltake embedded fans (3)	n/a
Agilent ArctiCooler embedded fan, unknown mfr (3)	n/a