| Ultra Products ChillTec Thermo Electric CPU Cooler
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Testing:
To test the cooling performance of the Ultra Products ChillTec Thermo Electric CPU Cooler, it was installed in a system with the following components:
» AMD X2 4200 AM2 processor @ 2750MHz
» Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe @ 250x11
» 2GB (2x1024) OCZ DDR2 8500 SLI RAM @ 1066MHz & 2.3V
» 2 eVGA 7900GTO cards in SLI
» Tagan TurboJet 1100W Power Supply
» 2x 80GB Hitachi Deskstar 3Gbps hard drives in RAID 0
» 1x 120GB Seagate 7200.9 SATA 3Gbps hard drive
» Memorex DVD/CDRW
» 10-in-1 media card reader
» Cooler Master CoolDrive IV bay device
» Fans: 2x120mm LED
The idle condition was established by powering the system at default speeds and voltages with no applications running for a period of at least 30 minutes. The load condition was established by running Folding@Home and SiSoft Sandra 2005's Burn-in Wizard for a period of at least 60 minutes. In addition to these stressful applications running, the loaded system was overclocked and overvolted (as detailed in the list above) to add more demand to the CPU. Temperatures were taken using the Cooler Master Cool Drive IV and the Ultra Products ChillTec controller.
The chart below shows the idle and load temperatures compared to the Cooler Master Eclipse, OCZ Tempest and the stock AMD cooler at an ambient temperature of 20 degrees Celsius.
The Ultra Products TEC cooler lowered the idle temperature by 2.6 degrees Celsius when compared to the next best cooler. At this temperature, the fan was on low, and was not audible over the other components in the test system. While a 2.6 degree drop is decent for idle temperatures, the biggest drop in temperatures came once the Peltier was activated under a load. It then shaved almost 10 degrees Celsius off of what the next best cooler could do! Also note that the Ultra Products ChillTec load temperature is only about 1.5 degrees more than the OCZ Tempest idle temperature!
While temperatures are always a concern, there is also the issue of noise level. Ultra Products brand fans have been fairly silent in my experience, barely elevating the noise level of my computer, and the fan on this cooler is no different. Before it would spin up, I could not identify it in my system. Under a load it would spin up, and I could identify it, but it was not significantly louder.
While using this product with Windows Vista Ultimate the fan would constantly spin up and down. I did not experience this under Windows XP, so I have to assume this is an issue with Windows Vista and the fan speed monitoring. But, I have not had this issue with any other coolers.
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