Airflow is provided by a 92 mm plastic fan with nine blades.

Based upon the picture, I count seven blades, not nine.

Has Kingwin has discontinued the RVT-9225 in favor of the follwoing "XTreme" units?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=5000163...040000574&name=CPU%20Fans%20%26%20Heatsinks&SpeT...[.com]

These newer Xtreme coolers have an additional heatpipe and an i7 bracket.

The RVT-9225 is sold out at all the retailers I checked.

Regarding the people who say that this is article is a valid comparison because it's relatively equivalent cost, you have a point. But not the whole point. Yes, it does meet (somewhat) the goal stated in the subtitle, "How much performance do you really get for your cooling buck?"

To those (like myself) who say that this article does not meet the goal stated in its title, "Battle of the elements: air vs. water CPU cooler showdown", we also have a point.

Yes, cost and ease of installation are very important, and should be considered and clearly called out. I have no problem with that.

However, a slew of mid to high-end air cooled heatsinks against a very low-end water cooling system, once again, does not meet the stated goals in the title of this article, and it's misleading to say so.

If this were truly a comparison between air and water, you would strive to have rough equivalence in the number water cooling setups as air. And you would have water cooling setups that range from low end to high end. You would also make the point (as the Anand article did) about the extra capabilities of a water setup, where you can hook in your video card and chipsets with no added noise (actually reduced noise if there are fans on those items), and very little degradation in heat removal capacity.

Once again, yes, that adds extra complexity and cost, and I'm quite OK with having that explicitly called out. But to entirely omit that option is to limit the scope of the article to something more like "Review of Domino ALC vs. Several Popular Air Coolers".

A mid/high-end water cooled rig, with a quality discreet pump, large separate radiator with large low-noise fans, and good quality water blocks would be admittedly more expensive and more complex, but would also be quieter than most all-in-one solutions, as well as measurably higher performance.

Speaking of coolers... try this:
Go to Google and search "thermalright"

Take a look at the first hit... it's for the thermalright website. But read the umm... "description"...

haha

#64, 65...yes, agreed. I think you nailed it...It's just not possible to get an air cooler inside a case that will be of comparable surface area to a liquid radiator as part of a water cooling system. Plus the cooling airflow over a radiator could use a fan of practically any size, whereas the case would limit fan size and air flow, with a Tuniq tower or some other cooler being an example of a practical size limit.

Having done applications work for under-hood applications involving radiator, intercooler, oil cooler, HVAC, and other cooler for off-highway applications, I am entirely unsure that any water-system can actually do better than an air system. Let me explain:

Caterpillar on gas engines had an old JWAC system, they used engine coolant to cool incoming charge engine air. This didn't work so well, so they moved to:

LACC...Essentially in my mind an analog to water cooling a CPU. The engine used a water loop to cool incoming engine air. This was sorta OK, except that the approach temperatures were not so great, but better than JWAC. You cool the incoming air with liquid, but turn around and cool the liquid with atmospheric air via a radiator. The next, and best step was:

ATAAC...Air-to-air charge cooling. Cool intake air via a heat exchanger with atmospheric air. It's the only way their gas engines could get top efficiency and the coldest, densest charge air. Sport tuner guys call charge coolers 'intercoolers', but the are the same thing.

I see a water cooling loop as an intermediate temperature reservoir, and thus less efficient than an air cooler...please point me to something that refutes this thinking.

I'm always amazed at how caught up people get with headlines. Somehow a several-hundred-word article is made irrelevant by ten words chosen to be terse and punchy. The intent of a headline is to interest you, to get you to click the link and (start to) read the story, not to give you a comprehensive description of its contents or "state the goal" of the article. Headlines are advertising. Your expectations for them should be in line with that. The quality of the article is in the article, not the headline.

I mean, I guess they could've called this

"A Comparison Of One Turnkey Watercooler And Two Common (But By No Means Representative Or Best) Aftermarket Air Coolers Without Taking Into Account Much Better (But More Expensive And Time-Consuming) DIY Water Cooling Rigs”

But I would've looked dull and ugly and I would've been much less likely to click on it, I think. And people would still be complaining that it was incomplete or misleading, I'd bet.

Nice to see a heatsink review on Tech Report. I would like to see two of the more popular options out there right now, the Sunbeam Core Contact and Xigmatek Dark Knight, but this is a good start and Noctua is becoming more popular with their products now available on Newegg (for the longest time they weren't, and they've only been there for less than a year).

Sucks about the motherboard not giving a proper mounting position. I blame this on a combination of AMD and the heatsink, there are a few heatsink models that get around this issue. Though AMD should really develop a socket layout that allows the user to more easily have the heatsink pointed in any direction... like Intel.

I love the photos! Cooler porn! While I appreciate the novelty of the water cooler, I'd prefer more air coolers in the lineup, even to the exclusion of water coolers. This coming from a fellow who visited the local junkyard for heatercores, mind. It's just that good air coolers can handle substantial overclocking and are considerably cheaper & easier to install than the water cooling setups which outperform them. You need to be a particularly enthused enthusiast to go with water cooling, I should think, at least compared to the vast majority of PC tinkerers.

Paired with a well-ventilated chassis, a good tower cooler is a bargain (I like Cooler Master's 590 & 690 cases with their myriad fan mountings). I'm using 120mm Sunbeam Core Contact Freezers with the i7 bracket — they work wonderfully. They're "heatpipe direct touch" jobbies. I bought the 120mm because it topped out Frostytech's synthetic test charts and was cheap on Newegg (thirty-something w/free shipping via one of those promo deals). I wonder if anybody has done a "direct touch heatsink roundup" — there's probably twenty or so of them on the market right now. The following companies are selling these types of coolers now:

Kingwing
Xigmatech
Sunbeam
Titan
Scythe
Vantec
OCZ
Akasa
Thermolab

Many of the products from the aforementioned lot are the same units rebranded — Xigmatech and Vantec, Sunbeam and Kingwing, etc. There's not even much variation from design to design, though — they're all just squarish finned towers with pipes up the center passing through a wee mounting plate. That's my only problem with the Sunbeam units I have — the weight of the fins and fan tends to make the tower sag down a little after a while. It hasn't lost any efficiency as far as I can tell, but the tower has indeed tilted inward noticeably.

I do wonder whether it'll ever be possible for folk to make a "direct touch" type unit where the pipes are seamlessly bonded to the baseplate — if so I'd imagine they'd been a smidge more effective. As it stands the pipes are just squished into pre-milled or pre-cast grooves in the baseplates, so there's a seam there. Hell, maybe they could even cast the baseplates with tubes through them and then attach the heatpipes to the ends of the holes — I dunno if that'd be feasible though.

I can't wait for the "earth vs. fire" article.

In my experience Noctua baseplates have tiny ridges that do not provide the best surface, but some careful lapping with ultrafine sandpaper gets you a little closer to the copper with a smoother finish. Also, getting the fan on can be tough, but some needlenose pliers work great for manipulating the fan clips.

This is hardly a comparison of water cooling in general. It is a comparison of one low-end liquid cooling solution against several mid to high-end air cooling solutions.

A Danger Den or Swiftech unit would like give you better cooling under load and/or better noise numbers. But yes, it would be more work.

I enjoyed the writeup but I really would liked to have seen a homebrew water cooling setup compared. These are cheap to put together but take some time and thought to get setup. The most expensive part is the waterblock but they can be carried on for years to each machine if you chose right.

It is no myth. It's fact. Water cooling is superior to Air cooling. Just because you place artificial monetary constraints around the system, does not disprove the facts.

There's nothing artificial about the cost--in both time and money--associated with water cooling setups. Pretending not to factor that into the value proposition is absurd.

Running a Noctua system on an E8400; silent and stable, even at 4GHz.

I am quite a fan of the high end Noctua heatsinks.

I have a C12P, the "UFO" counterpart of the U12P used in this test, which I use with a Q9400, running 3.2 GHz, with a small voltage boost. With the lowest fan speed, running several passes of Intel Burn Test, the highest temperature the CPU hit was 50C.

I often run the CPU at near a full load for hours at a time, and it stays in the 40C range.

I literally can't hear the fan, at least, not over the PSU fan, which is pretty much the only audible component of this computer. It's not cheap, but it's not outrageously expensive, either, and it's done right in every way, so I have nothing to complain about.

Did you guys list heatpipe diameters anywhere? Just curious, I don't think I saw it...

Also this is a pretty diminutive watercooling setup, so honestly, performance was about as expected...

Reminds me of the CoolerMaster Aquagate that I got back in the day (and still have in the closet). I had the R120, the 120mm version that performed pretty well. Certainly was much simpler than a full-blown setup, although I don't know that it performed any better than the stock HSF.
It was really cool though, and fit the theme of my case with the 4x12" CCFL's and 6x80mm LED lights.
My how things have changed.

Nice review, the Noctua heat sink system is the way to go for a decent overclock. I might go for one with the next system upgrade.

I owned the Domino for a couple of weeks and returned it for the very reasons mentioned in this article. My TRUE cooler works better by 3 to 4C and is MUCH quieter. I'm glad to see that the limited testing I performed is validated by Damage labs=) http://techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=65847

This comment doesn't have much to do with the direct article per se, but I'd like to see more of this. Scott/Geoff/Cyril are busy with respected duties and I doubt they have extra time to do this sort of stuff. But Josh, I really think this is where you can come in and really add an extra dimension to TR. Cooling is such an important part of computers but gets so little mention. Go crazy. Do air vs water (like this article), have a big 'ol cooler shootout, what's the best thermal compund, what's the best bang-for-buck cooler, keep tabs on new coolers released, review "other" cooling solutions like fans (S-flex) and what's the quitest 120mm.

I really think something like this would be great on TR for somebody to "take over"

Finally the review comes out! I've been waiting months for this since you first mentioned the idea Joshua. I have to dig into this after dinner.

The article forgets to metion that Noctua has the NH-U12P SE1366 for the 1366 socket and it comes with 2 fans.
And the thermal compound is not at all basic it's a rather good one.

WHOOOOAH! A heatsink review? Holy blue moon Batman!

Thanks TR!