Review

Anand Tech, February 6th, 2007
Monsoon II Lite: Thermal Electric Cooling Tower

Topic: Cases & Cooling

Manufacturer: Vigor Gaming

Author: Wesley Fink

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Cooling Results

The Vigor Monsoon II Lite is certainly one of the most effective coolers we have tested, reaching new overclock levels and matching or bettering the best performance so far in cooling.

Where the very good Intel stock cooler keeps the X6800 at 41C at idle, the Monsoon II Lite maintains 32C, which is a significant improvement. This is not quite as cool as the Tuniq Tower 120 at stock idle, but the practical difference between the 27C we measured with the Tuniq Tower 120 and the 32C measured with the Monsoon II Lite is not very significant when the design parameters of the Monsoon II TEC are considered. As processor speed increases the Tuniq and Monsoon II get closer in cooling, so that at 3.90Ghz the Tuniq is 40C and the Monsoon is 42C. The Monsoon also overclocks further to 3.96GHz.

As the processor is pushed to its highest stable overclock using the retail HSF, the delta increases. At 3.73GHz the retail HSF is running at 56C, compared to 40C with the Monsoon II. The Monsoon II and Tuniq Tower 120 perform similarly at idle speeds across the operating speeds they can achieve.

It is easy to measure the effectiveness of a cooling solution at idle - when the computer is doing nothing except running the temperature measurement program. It is more difficult, however, to effectively simulate a computer being stressed by all of the conditions it might be exposed to in different operating environments. For most home users CPU power is most taxed with contemporary gaming. Therefore our stress test simulates running a demanding game. The Far Cry River demo is looped for 30 minutes and the CPU temperature is captured at four second intervals with the NVIDIA Monitor "logging" option. The highest temperature during the stress test is then reported.

Cooling efficiency of the Monsoon II Lite under stress conditions was compared to the retail HSF and other recently tested CPU coolers. Once again the well-regarded Tuniq Tower 120 and the Monsoon II Lite were the top performers. It is interesting that the Tuniq and Monsoon II results got closer as the CPU speed under stress conditions reached higher.

The Tuniq keeps the CPU at 34C under stress at stock speeds, where the Monsoon II manages 39C. However, by 3.90GHz the Tuniq is at 51C compared to the Monsoon II at 53C - much closer results. Only the Tuniq and Monsoon II were able to reach 3.9GHz with this processor, but the Monsoon II Lite system allowed an even higher overclock of 3.96GHz, which is the highest we have reached with this CPU.

As stated many times, the overclocking abilities of the CPU will vary at the top, depending on the CPU. This particular CPU does higher FSB speeds than any X6800 we have tested, but the 3.9GHz top speed with the Tuniq is pretty average among the X6800 processors we have tested with Tuniq cooling. A few of the other processors tested with the best air coolers reach just over 4 GHz, but the range has been 3.8 to 4.0GHz. Stock cooling generally tops out 200 to 400 MHz lower, depending on the CPU, on the processors tested in our lab. The 3.96GHz with the Monsoon II is certainly the highest this CPU has seen so far.

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