OK, so as I referenced in a couple of previous articles, I am working on an old DFI LanParty Ultra-D motherboard rig and seeing how it compares to an old ASRock 939Dual-Sata2 motherboard as well as an old ASUS A8N-SLI motherboard in terms of performance and see how it has held up over the years. To help with overclocking, I purchased a DeepCool (or Logisys if you want to go by the brand that acquired them) IceWind Pro heat-sink. This heat-sink I purchased was 35 dollars and has heat pipe direct touch or HDT technology. This is where the heat pipes are in direct contact with the CPU allowing for better heat transfer rather than the heat pipes being soldered to the base of the heat-sink and the base of the heat-sink has to transfer the heat from the CPU to the heat pipes (which is less efficient in heat transfer).
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| The box for the DeepCool IceWind Pro |
Inside the box it comes with one 120mm DeepCool fan, the installation guide (which is in English and Japanese), fan mounts for two 120mm fans (if you ever want to configure a push/pull setup, a plastic bracket so you can install it on any of the popular Intel sockets (775, 1366, 1155), a warranty card, and of course, the heat-sink itself.
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| The contents of the IceWind Pro box |
The white box that was wedged below the heat-sink contained the plastic Intel bracket adapter, thermal paste, and plastic pins. The plastic bracket for the Intel sockets seems fairly sturdy with next to no flex. How it mounts on to the motherboard is by using the included black plastic tabs and clipping it all together. Personally, I would have liked to see metal and screws instead of plastic tabs, simply because plastic becomes brittle over time and could break causing your heat-sink to come dislodged and land somewhere not nice. Also included in the plastic baggy is the included thermal paste (in the white packet). I won't be using that thermal paste and will instead be using Prolimatech PK-1 thermal paste that I acquired a couple months back.
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| The Intel plastic bracket, pins and included thermal paste |
As mentioned above, the cooler comes with both English and Japanese instructions on how to install the heat-sink on to both AMD (using the stock backplate) and Intel (LGA775/1155/1366) sockets. I would have liked to see more than just English and Japanese instructions, but at the very least it has a fair amount of diagrams as to how everything should be mounted which is usually good enough even for most people that are new to mounting aftermarket heat-sinks.
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| The English side of the manual |
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| The Japanese side of the manual |
The fan that is included is a 120mm fan. According to DeepCool, the fan has a max airflow of 66.3 CFM and up to 27.6dB of noise. This is very similar to their UF120mm fan specs, but without the rubber TPE frame. The type of bearing it uses is a hydro bearing allowing it to spin fairly smoothly. Similarly to the Phanteks fan that I reviewed previously, the DeepCool fan has some teeth on the fins allowing it to reduce turbulence to create less vibration and noise while it is in operation. The fan comes with four rubber feet that help to also reduce vibration while it's attached to the heat-sink (which I think is a nice touch). It feels a bit like the fan is an OEM fan simply because the back sticker is completely blank, but luckily I won't be seeing that sticker anyway since it will be pressed up against the heat-sink. The metal badge on the impeller is a nice touch as well as it acts as a bit of a heat-sink for the motor inside the fan helping to reduce the amount of heat and wear on the fan over time. The fan also has a 4-pin PWM connection rather than a standard 3-pin fan connector which would be useful for more modern motherboards, but the DFI motherboard does not have any PWM connectors on the board unfortunately, so I cannot test the full functionality of it. DeepCool also includes an extra set of fan hooks if you ever wish to install another fan on to the heat-sink in a push/pull configuration.
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| The front of the DeepCool 120mm fan |
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| The rear of the DeepCool 120mm fan |
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| The included two sets of hooks that can be used to install two fans |
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| The small teeth on the fins of the DeepCool 120mm fan |
Now on to the important stuff. The heat-sink itself comes equipped with four 6mm heat pipes in a direct touch configuration. The heat pipes are aligned such that they are parallel to the heat-sink fins to allow for better airflow and cooling through the heat-sink as all of the heat pipes have (mostly) equal access to the air that is flowing through the heat-sink allowing them to be all equally cooled at a greater rate. The shape of the heat-sink fins is a fair bit different from a standard configuration where they are all the exact same size. DeepCool has designed the heat-sink fins in a way such that it looks like a wave with peaks and valleys which is apparently supposed to also help with cooling (which I could understand the theory as it would allow for the fan to create pockets of air and have less resistance to the fins themselves). Above the heat pipe base there is an aluminum heat-sink to allow for some more cooling to allow for no hot-spotting on the CPU. I'm not sure if it's just that I got a poor quality heat-sink or what, but my aluminum fins on the base are all tooled up and have scratches. Luckily the base looks to be OK though without any scratches that would cause less heat transference and less efficient cooling. On the very top fin of the heat-sink it reads DeepCool's logo as well as their "motto" "Enjoy your cool life!". I think that the motto is a bit cheesy, but I won't see the heat-sink much anyway since the side panel is fully black.
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| The DeepCool IceWind Pro heat-sink |
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| The base of the IceWind Pro heat-sink |
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| The top of the IceWind Pro heat-sink |
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| The scratched up aluminum base of the IceWind Pro heat-sink |
Now on to installing this heat-sink into the DFI LanParty rig. It's a fairly simple sounding affair for AMD users as it uses the stock backplate that comes on any AMD board. When I was removing the old heat-sink (which was stuck on there because of the previous thermal paste that was used in the system) I cut my thumb on the 7600GS cause I wasn't thinking to take it out prior to working on it. After cutting I bandaged myself up, and removed the 7600GS to prevent me cutting my hands more and allowing me for some more space to install the new heat-sink. I then cleaned the old thermal paste off of the CPU (using the Arctic Cleaner previously mentioned in my Phanteks heat-sink review), laid on some Prolimatech PK-1 thermal paste, and started to try to install the IceWind Pro on to the CPU. It is a bit difficult to actually get started installing it as the clip arms are a bit stiff, but with a bit of force it locks on. After I managed to finally install the heat-sink on to the motherboard, installing the fan on to the heat-sink was extremely simple. Just align the fan clips such that the two pin areas go into the front of the fan holes (where screws would normally mount) and then have the pull tabs facing outwards, then proceed to slide the fan clip on to the heat-sink. As the DFI board has the location of the CPU a bit different from standard boards of today, the heat-sink rides fairly low to the GPU. As such, it was almost a bit of a tight fit with the fan nearly resting on the back of the heat-sink that is attached to the nVidia 7600GS card that was in the system. I would have loved to have used my ATi Radeon HD4850 in the system (to allow for some better clearance), but as it only has a 400w PSU, it would be overburdened and unstable.
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| How the DFI LanParty Ultra-D system looked prior to installing the IceWind Pro |
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| The AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ all cleaned up and ready for the new heat-sink |
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| The IceWind Pro installed into the system |
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| How the fan clip is supposed to install on to the DeepCool fan |
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| The DeepCool fan installed on to the IceWind Pro |
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| The amount of clearance between the 7600GS and the IceWind Pro |
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| An alternate shot of the clearance between the 7600GS and the IceWind Pro |
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| How the system would have looked if I could use the Radeon HD4850 |
I botched up a BIOS flash initially. Luckily I had another stick of RAM that was able to work with the motherboard to boot it back up and re-flash with another BIOS revision. After fiddling with a number of settings in the BIOS to get the overclock testing started, I've started by trying 2.8GHz to see if it can compare to my ASRock motherboard. Memtest86+ seems to read the settings a bit weird off the motherboard, reading that the RAM is running at 280MHz instead of 200 (which is what the ratio should be at). It seems that it's a ratio issue in that some of the ratios listed don't actually get detected correctly (atleast through Memtest86+) except for the ones that are used for standard RAM speeds (100/133/166/200). I originally tried the 2.8GHz overclock using the ratio of 7:10 (which was listed at 140MHz). So the RAM when I tested it worked at 280MHz? Not! Was actually running at 196MHz. Dang. For some reason using the weird ratios gets detected in Memtest86+ as a 1:1 ratio instead of it's correct one. I then went back and changed the ratio to 5/6 (166MHz) and tested on Memtest86+ (which is actually listing it at 233MHz as it should be). It passed Memtest86+ again! Now to see if it will boot into Windows XP without failing. 2.8GHz overclock on the CPU and a 33MHz increase on the RAM is pretty good I would say. So I get to the loading screen for Windows XP and it literally gives me a blue screen after about 2 seconds. Not a BSOD, a literal blue screen that's similar in color to a BSOD but without any text on it. OK, I said to myself, lets try 275FSB. Managed to get into Windows up to the desktop for about a second, then a power failure restart. Hmm, lets try 270 and hope for the best. Managed to get into Windows and tested programs. Seems to be working, but won't know if it's 100% without a Prime95 test. I may be able to get 2.8GHz if I REALLY tried to get the timings and fiddle with everything in the BIOS, but for now 2.7GHz CPU and 225MHz RAM is a good start definitely. Normally overclocking I can't get the ram to go more than 15MHz higher than normal (normal being 200MHz) on 939 boards so 25MHz overclock is pretty acceptable still. Of course, right now I'm only testing with two 1GB sticks in, so once I finish fiddling with the overclock to see how tight I can get the timings, I'll have to install the other two 1GB sticks in to the system and see if it's still stable. But I'll save that for another day. In the meantime, a 0.7GHz increase in the CPU and 25MHz increase in the RAM speed is sufficient, especially considering I probably won't even be using that system all that much anyway. But it's that I have a backup rig now that is decent enough speed that I won't feel depressed if my i7 ever kicks out for whatever reason.
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