Coolers for AMD Athlon64: Asus StarIce vs Titan Siberia
Titan Siberia for AMD Athlon 64
We are presenting another cooler taking part in our tests - Titan Siberia for AMD Athlon 64. It is packed in a plastic box of formidable size, with the brief installation guide illustrated on the reverse side.
Apart from the cooler itself, it comes bundled with a rotation regulator (fitted on the 3" front panel of the housing), two fastening screws, as well as tub of thermo paste. This Titan thermo paste is of new type - of blue color.
The distinctive feature of the cooler is its huge 120 mm fan which is much larger than the radiator.
The radiator is of small height and is quite difficult to see behind.
Also, note that the radiator and the fan are not an integral part: the fan is mounted on a special fastening frame with a lever. Using the lever, it takes 5 seconds to remove the fan:
The radiator itself is made of aluminum and has a copper insert in the base.
The processing quality of the base is decent enough (although grinding traces are visible). To prevent the surface from scratching, there is a protective sticker on the base.
The first stage in the cooler assemblage is its installation and fixing with fastening screws. However, this method works only on those boards which offer a reinforcement plate with threaded holes. That means the cooler cannot be installed on motherboards made by Gigabyte (which offer a socket frame with plastic clips as the fasteners).
The second stage of the cooler is to attach a fan. That the fan is mounted on a fastening plane allows its flexible orientation: the air flow not getting into the radiator can be directed for cooling the power supply module of the motherboard or for cooling the memory modules. Also, if the board has some deviations from the standard, the fan can be fitted at 180 degree turn thus avoiding a conflict.
Now let's look at the speed regulator which has two cables. One of them is connected directly to the motherboard (via a 3-pin connector), the other - to the cooler's fan.
With it, the user can smoothly vary the fan's rotational speed within 1400RPM to 2900RPM. At the same time, the noise varies within 27 dBa to 45 dBa, with the air flow fluctuating within 58 CFM to 111.73 CFM. Despite the impressive performance, the cooler's efficiency proved quite weak: during the tests, the radiator was simply red hot, while the part of the air flow coming to the radiator was definitely not enough for its cooling.
In conclusion, let me stress it out that Titan Siberia is a very stylish and nice cooler, notably due to its fan. The latter is made in a blue housing, has silver-plated blades and is closed with a metal grid. Moreover, the manufacturing quality of the fan is high: at the minimum rotational speed, the noise is small, while at the maximum speed you can hear only air rustling albeit immense.
The preliminary conclusion - the bottleneck of Titan Siberia is its small and weak radiator. Therefore, this cooler may be of interest to the regular user mostly due to is low noise level, as well as its ability to cool the motherboard components (or memory motherboards). For the overclocker, this cooler is of no interest - it is unable to cool a strongly overclocked processor.
Pros:
- Low noise level at the minimum speed;
- Fantastic exterior;
- Ease of installation + adjustable position of the fan;
- Speed regulator available;
- Motherboard components can be cooled;
- Relatively low price (~17$).
Cons:
- Middling cooling efficiency.
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