Review

Vigor Monsoon II Review
by Thomas Gribble

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Monsoon II

After we completed our testing with the Big Typhoon, we embarked on the long journey that was installing the Monsoon II. For more details of this installation procedure, see above. We reverted the system settings back to the stock and idle state and commenced testing on the Monsoon II.

These numbers are not too impressive, showing only about a 4C improvement on the surface of the chip and a 6C improvement on the on-chip diode reading. However, the bigger story here is power consumption.

When comparing the system using a Thermaltake Big Typhoon with the same system using the Monsoon II, at STOCK settings, the power consumption appears to have increased dramatically. This is actually quite alarming, considering we did not expect the TEC to be switched on for much of the time under stock settings.

Overclocking the system back to the exact same settings we used with the Big Typhoon, we can see even more interesting results. It seems as though the effectiveness of the Monsoon II increases as temperatures and stresses rise.

An 8C improvement on processor surface temperature when compared to the Big Typhoon? Not bad at all. Also somewhat interesting was the drop in the temperature reading from the on-chip diode from 73C to 64C. This seems to mean that the surface temperature of the chip is correlated to the temperature underneath the chip, which is of course expected. Let¡¦s also not disregard the numbers we see for the system¡¦s exhaust. These numbers give us a good idea about how hard the TEC is working, because excessively hot air coming out of the back of the computer is a surefire sign that the TEC is working. This is so because the air coming off the normally cooled processor is not nearly as warm. The extra heat being generated by the TEC needs to be transferred out of the case, so the exhaust is telling us whether or not things are heating up. But far and away the most interesting numbers we obtained in our testing were those of the overclocked system power consumption under load.

The 312W reading is a 77% increase from the stock/idle reading of 176W. That is a HUGE difference. Let us not forget that during the entire test battery, the system¡¦s video card remained in an idle state. Had the video card been under full load on the final tests, power consumption would likely have been very near 400W. For a single video card system, 400W is quite a lot. Now let¡¦s take a look at some graphs showing a direct comparison for temperatures measured when using the two different cooling solutions.

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