I have always heard the myth of cooking an egg on the sidewalk during a hot summer day. Some people have even tried this, trying to prove or debunk the myth. If a sidewalk can reach temperatures hot enough to fry an egg, imagine the confections we could create using today’s high-end processor. You might be able to fry a tiny omlette or bake a 1/4″ brownie – there’s an idea ready to pop: create a heatsink with a teflon inner easy-bake oven! Getting back to the point: today’s processors generate an enormous amount of heat and hefty copper heatsinks are the only real answer for air cooling these thermal marvels.
There are not alot of heatsinks for the Pentium 4 LGA775, as the mounting method is very specific. Any 775 heatsink must be attached to a metal brace on the underside of the motherboard. This mechanism prevents the motherboard from warping with tension, and ensures that relatively flimsy plastic pieces will not break. This ensures a high-quality and sturdy mounting method. Evercool has manufactured a new LGA775 heatsink called the CopperMan, which is constructed completely of copper and looks to be a high-performance contender for Pentium 4 LGA-775 processors.
Packaging:
The Evercool Copper Man heatsink is housed in a clear plastic blister-pack, which requires scissors and adult supervision to open. Inside the package is the heatsink itself (the fan, brace, mounting screws, and heatsink are come assembled together), and a small pack of while thermal paste.
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The fin design is similar to Zalman’s CNPS line of heatsinks, but the fins are soldered to a solid copper core. Zalman’s base is formed by placing lots of shaved copper layers together, whereas this Evercool heatsink uses a different implementation: solder shaved copper fins directly to a thick copper base. Both methods perform very well, as a welded or soldered joint performs about as well as a solid sheet. There is a basic formula to determine a copper heatsink’s potential: weight, surface area, and airflow. Heatsinks with thick fins do not have as much surface area as a sink with the same weight with razer-thin fins. Air can blow over more surface area, removing more radiated heat.
The thin fins of the CopperMan already promise high-performance heat removal. The fins are positioned in such a way as to direct residual airflow out onto the motherboard components surrounding the heatsink, providing auxilary motherboard cooling.
The bottom of the sink is formed from a solid slab of copper, and has a slightly tapered rim. The base comes protected with a plastic film that must be removed before installation. The base is highly reflective, indicating an extremely smooth surface, with no milling required. Only a very small amount of thermal paste will be needed to achieve solid contact between the processor and this heatsink. The circular base is surrounded by a metal (I am assuming steel) brace, which branches out to four arms acting as the mounting contact point. Spring-loaded screws are to be inserted through the holes in these arms to the motherboard’s mounting rods. The heavy copper base extends all the way up to the copper fins, to ensure maximum heat transfer from core to fin.
The fan looks like a standard square clear 80mm case fan, but has been modified to fit onto the circular shape of the copper fins. The fan in screwed into place using four small screws, and has a long 3-pin fan lead. There are four blue LEDs in each corner of the square fan, which should provide a decent glow in our case.
Unfortunately, this sink is only usable with a Pentium 4 LGA775. This heatsink would be a real contender in the market if it included mounting methods for Athlon 64 and Pentium 4 478 processors. Zalman heatsinks are doing rather well because they can be used on a variety of motherboards. If a user upgrades then they don’t have to throw away a perfectly good expensive heatsink.
Installation
Using a back-plate would seem like quite an ordeal for mounting a heatsink. Usually this type of heatsink method requires the motherboard to be uninstalled to attach the back-plate. All LGA775 motherboards use a back-plate, so one should already be installed. All that is required is to unscrew your current heatsink and install this new one. The CopperMan’s mounting mechanism is standard and does not require use of it’s own backplate, so we used the one already installed by the motherboard manufacturer.
Installation is very simple if your motherboard already has another heatsink installed (which most should if you are upgrading to the CopperMan). Otherwise you will have to mount the backplate to the underside of the motherboard through the retention holes. Next, spread a thin layer of thermal paste to your Pentium 4. If you haven’t done so, remove the plastic film protecting the Copperman’s smooth base and align the holes in the retention arms with the retention rods now sticking up through the motherboard. Now place the spring-loaded retention screws over each rod and tighten, which will push the heatsink down onto the processor. Make sure you connect the fan’s lead to a fan port on the motherboard, and the assembly is complete. Evercool has an installation guide on ther website if further assistance is needed.
Fan noise
28-30 dBA is pretty standard for a 80mm case fan. Other components in your computer will probably create more noise than this fan, which can be silenced to inaudible levels with a rheostat or fanbus. At full power it is not noisy and provides enough airflow to be effective.
The blue light emmitted from the fan is striking, but the square fan is just uninventive contrasted with the beautiful circular heatsink hidden underneath. This is a great heatsink is made to look no better than an OEM sink upon installation.
We paired ThermaxTech’s high performance thermal paste (upcoming review pending) with various other LGA-775 heatsinks for comparison. This was tested on the OCmodshop server itself, which is a 1U case. Unfortunately, the CopperMan will not fit in such a small case, so the lid was left open during our test period. We used the OEM heatsink that came with the processor, as well as a VapoChill Micro and Thermaltake Silent 775.
Test unit
- SuperMicro server motherboard
- Pentium 4 LGA 775 3.0Ghz (2MB cache with Hyper-Threading) 800MHz FSB
- 2GB DDR-2 533Mhz
- 2x Seagate 120MB HDDs (RAID 1)
- PCI-X RAID Card
- Windows Server 2003
| Evercool CopperMan LGA-775 Performance Chart |
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As the test shows, the Evercool Copperman performs better than any other heatsink we could throw at our Pentium 4, especially the Intel OEM heatsink. It is a rather hefy copper mass with lots of surface area, which is what yields such high performance. The other coolers just weren’t has heavy or had as much surface area. This is an excellent heatsink for Intel Pentium4 LGA 775 processors. Below is a chart that breaks down our findings into bite-size nuggets:
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