Lux-Design was nice enough to send me a few things to review and this will be the first. They are the exclusive Canadian distributor for Aerocool which is a heatsink company. This particular heatsink is called the Glacier and is made of copper and is compatible with all socket 7, socket 370, and socket 462 (A) CPUs. There is a lot of competition in the heatsink market right now especially with the emergence of more watercooling companies lately which are much better than air cooling. With so many companies infiltrating the market it can be really hard to choose the best heatsink for your system and for your needs.
This heatsink doesn’t really come in a box but more of a container. It is a transparent blue box which holds the heatsink and the generic thermal compound that comes with it. The 3-pin fan on top of the heatsink as you can see is also transparent blue.
Looking down on the heatsink you can see that the fan is a transparent blue and you can see the fins of the heatsink. The fan pushes 51.5 CFM while spinning at 3400RPM and puts out 34 dBa which isn’t too bad. I like the blue fan more than I do the standard black one because it just looks a lot nicer. The fan comes with a 3-pin connection that you can plug into your motherboard so that you can monitor the RPMs.
From the side of the heatsink you can see that it uses a type of shroud with the fan. the shroud more moves the fan away from the opening so that air can move through it well. The other side of the heatsink has 5 holes cut into the shroud and through a few of the holes you can see that the fins also have holes cut in them. These holes in the fins and shroud will move air through them and hopefully help the heatsink cool the CPU better.
The clip on this heatsink does not require a screwdriver which is a good thing if it works well. Using a screwdriver creates a risk of damaging your motherboard so this clip is a good thing. The bottom of the heatsink is not protected by anything like a plastic sheet so it came kinda scratched up. The finish on the base isn’t really that good to begin with but there are also some pretty good scratches on it as well. My guess is that most of the extra scratches were made by the plastic box which it came in. Luckily there were not very many scratches where the core of the CPU is going to be.
The clip on this heatsink is pretty good; the fact that a screwdriver is not needed is a real plus. The clip works relatively well but its a little hard to get a hold of it, the shroud on the side where the clip is gets in the way and made it hard for me to get a good grip on it with any of my fingers. After a few tries at it I got it on, I like this clip overall but I think if they made the tab for the part you push down longer it would be much better.
I will be using an EPoX 8K9A2+ which I will have a review of soon with my Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz). I have talked to both EPoX and the maker of Motherboard Monitor and I am still unsure if the onboard diode of the XP is being read by the software so until I am positive I am not going to say that it is. I believe that heatsink testing is really relative, meaning that I think it’s more important how heatsinks compare rather than the actual temperature you get. It is important to get as low of a temperature as possible but I think comparison is the main key. I want to do a socket A heatsink roundup and will do so as soon as I have time. I will be using Arctic Silver 3 as the thermal compound because it is the best on the market. Idle temperatures were taken while idling in the BIOS and the load temperatures were achieved by using Prime95 which put the CPU up to 100%.
Test Bed
- EPoX 8K9A2+ (review to come)
- 1800+ Athlon XP
- 60GB Seagate Barracuda IV HDD
- XtremeDDR PC3500 (review to come)
- 3DPower Geforce 3
- Cooler Master ATC-101-SX2
- Zalman 300w PSU
- Sound Blaster Live! Value
- ATi TV Wonder VE
- Plextor 40x12x40 CDRW
- pioneer 16x DVD
I tested with the stock fan on this heatsink with the CPUs the default speed and voltage. After letting my system idle in the BIOS for about 15 minutes the idle temperature was 37 degrees which is really good. I booted into windows and loaded up Prime95 to bring the CPU to 100% load. After about 20 minutes of Prime95 the load temperature was 41 degrees which is also really good. The fan is a little louder than I want to put up with but I like my system to be quiet, most of you probably will not mind the 34 dBa it puts out.
I wanted to see if this heatsink could do well during a little overclocking so I turned my computer off for a while and let the CPU and heatsink cool down to get accurate results. I booted back up and went into the BIOS, I bumped the FSB up to 150 and the Vcore up to 1.85v which gave me 1.73GHz and was recognized as a 2100+. I saved the settings, rebooted, and went back into the BIOS and let it idle again for about 15 minutes. The idle temperature while the CPU was overclocked was 40 degrees, but the load temp is really what matters. I booted back into Windows and again ran Prime95 after another 20 minutes of that I got a load temperature of 47 degrees Celsius. A load temperature of 47 degrees is really good and you should be able to push the voltage up a little more as long as you are careful.
Conclusion
I am very impressed with this heatsink; it did a great job cooling my CPU while keeping the noise level at a fairly low level. I like that the fan is a blue transparent one rather than a black one because the transparent blue one looks much better.
This heatsink did a great job with my CPU at the default speed/voltage and while being overclocked with more voltage than normal. With a stock load temp of only 41 and overclocked load of 47 degrees this heatsink should not disappoint . The clip is nice, but with a little improvement it would work even better, hopefully Aerocool will take this advice into consideration.
I would also like to see Aerocool put something on the bottom of the heatsink to protect it from being scratched. This heatsink is only $28 US and $45 Canadian so it is really a good buy, especially for you Canadians. Overall I am going to give this heatsink an 9/10, and am going to award it the OCmodshop seal of approval. I would like to thank Lux-Design for sending this over. Look forward to a review of a Sunbeam Rheobus soon, which spamsk8r will be doing.
Pros
- All copper design
- Transparent blue fan
- Great performance
- Pretty good clip design
- Low price
- Thermal compound included
Cons
- Base came scratched