Our testing methods
Today we'll be comparing the CNPS9500 LED's performance to that of a stock AMD cooler and to Zalman's own CNPS7700-AlCu. We've confined the bulk of our testing to a Socket 939 platform with an early Athlon 64 FX-53 sample that runs nice and hot. Extended load tests were also conducted with a Pentium 4 660 3.6GHz to confirm that the CNPS9500 LED could indeed handle one of Intel's hottest Prescott chips without throttling. The CNPS9500 had no problem handling the Prescott processor, and even after hours of a combined Folding@home and Prime95 load with the cooler's lowest fan speed setting, the CPU temperature refused to budge over 65C.
We used the following test system.
| Processor | AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 2.4GHz |
| System bus | HyperTransport 16-bit/1GHz |
| Motherboard | DFI LANParty UT NF4 Ultra-D |
| BIOS revision | NF4LD209 |
| North bridge | NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra |
| South bridge | |
| Chipset drivers | ForceWare 6.66 |
| Memory size | 1GB (2 DIMMs) |
| Memory type | OCZ PC3200 EL Platinum Rev 2 DDR SDRAM at 400MHz |
| CAS latency (CL) | 2 |
| RAS to CAS delay (tRCD) | 2 |
| RAS precharge (tRP) | 2 |
| Cycle time (tRAS) | 5 |
| Hard drives | Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 NCQ SATA |
| Audio | nForce4/ALC850 |
| Audio driver | Realtek HD 1.24 |
| Graphics | NVIDIA GeForce 6200 with ForceWare 77.77 drivers |
| OS | Microsoft Windows XP Professional |
| OS updates | Service Pack 2, DirectX 9.0c |
Our test system was powered by OCZ PowerStream power supply units. The PowerStream was one of our Editor's Choice winners in our latest PSU round-up.
We used the following versions of our test applications:
- Prime95 24.14
The test systems' Windows desktop was set at 1280x1024 in 32-bit color at an 85Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests. Most of the 3D gaming tests used the Medium detail image quality settings, with the exception that the resolution was set to 640x480 in 32-bit color.
All the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.
