Who needs fancy, expensive water cooling for your CPU when you have 1¾ pounds of aluminum fins, heatpipes, and a 9-blade 120mm fan? Enter, the Tuniq Tower 120. It is, simply, the best CPU cooler you can buy; and for $50, it may very well change your life.
The Tuniq Tower 120 Ultra Silent CPU Cooler is one of the best high performance cpu heatsinks for cooling today’s fastest processors. The Tuniq 120 balances noise and performance, offering excellent cooing performance with minimal noise. A unique 9 blade offers improved air flow compared to regular 7 blade fans. Also, a fan speed control is included so that you have more control over the fan noise and speed. The 3 copper heat pipes draw heat from the copper base and which is then dissipated by the aluminum fins and cooling fan.
|
||||||
The sheer mass and commanding presence should tell you right from the beginning that this piece of hardware means business. The Tuniq Tower 120 is designed to fit Intel’s socket 775, and AMD’s socket 754, 939, and 940, but NOT AM2 – this is actually very disappointing considering that socket AM2 has been available for a very long time now. Although there are a few adapters from other manufacturers that conceivably let you use the Tower 120 in an AM2 socket, Tuniq really should support AM2 themselves right out of the box. For the other sockets, Tuniq includes a number of brackets and screws depending on what you need.
The cooler itself is impressive to say the least. There are over 50 radiating aluminum fins (arranged in an artistic design somewhat resembling flames) to disperse heat and three copper heat pipes attached to a copper base. The build is high quality and sturdy – I know this because I actually dropped the thing! I’m not kidding, it is heavy! Thank God I didn’t drop in on the motherboard, or I am sure it would have broken some fragile capacitor or resistor. Physical installation looks like it could be harder than it actually is. Tuniq included a very thorough and detailed manual giving excellent instructions on how to connect the Tower 120 to each socket type (except of course AM2).
Now, to cool this idolatrous mass of metal, Tuniq has included a monster 120mm fan, which actually sits inside the radiating fins, and utilizes nine blades. The fan speed is controllable via a little dial that lets you vary between 1000 and 2000 RPM – the dial is installed in a slot in the back of your case where a PCI card would go. The fan is very quiet, but does a perfect job of cooling the unit.
For the test setup:
- Motherboard: ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe Socket 939
- Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ 2.0GHz
- Memory: 2GB Corsair Value Select DDR400 dual channel mode (kept at stock speeds throughout the evaluation)
- Video card: EVGA GeForce 6800GS
- Hard disk: 2 x 120GB Seagate Barracuda 9 series
- Optical drives: LG DVD-R/RW; 1 old-school Panasonic DVD-ROM
- OS: Windows XP Professional SP2
- Case: Apevia X-Cruiser-BK
At regular speeds, the stock heat-sink-fan (HSF) works just fine. It’s not particularly quiet though, and once you start overclocking, the stock units become less and less adequate. At regular speeds of 2.0 GHz, all is well with the stock cooler; idle temp was 32 degrees Celsius, under a full load of Prime95 on both cores, temp went up to 38C. That’s not too bad at all, really. The good air-flow design of the Apevia case also certainly contributes to lower overall temperatures.
But let’s turn up the juice, and put this CPU through its paces a little shall we? Cranking the bus up to 220 gives us a little 10% overclock (2.2 GHz, the CPU has a multiplier of 10), but this doesn’t seem to change temp too much at all; 35C idle temp, 41C loaded. The Asus board is a champion OCer though, so lets throw something tough at it: ratcheting the bus up to 260 yields a speed of 2.6 GHz, and temps go up a fair amount, to 44C idle and 52C load.
To go higher than 2.6GHz with this CPU it was necessary to increase the voltage, which turns the heat up even more. 2.8 GHz was as high as possible with the stock HSF, and the temperatures were a markedly uncomfortable 49C idle and 60C load. According the AMD’s specifications for the A64 X2 3800+, max temp is 71C – that’s about 160F!! That’s just too hot for my tolerance, but it is amazing that the included HSF could get the CPU to the point it did.
Popping in the Tuniq Tower 120 immediately resulted in temperature improvements as well as a drastic decrease in noise (FYI, the speed of the fan was kept at 2000 RPM). At stock CPU speeds, temps were 23C at idle and 29C under a full load. At 2.2 GHz, temps were 26C and 32C. At 2.6GHz the Tower 120 kept the system nice & cool at 35C idle and 42C load. At 2.8 GHz the Tuniq HSF still managed to keep temperatures at 40C idle and 51C load.
Considering that the processor was previously able to remain stable at 60C on the stock cooler – and with the Tuniq, the highest temp has been 51C, so there might be a little room to go even higher, hmm? So I set the FSB to 300, preparing to meet failure, and then the computer got to the POST screen. Wow! Then Windows started. Wow!! Then the desktop loaded, and I was astounded, but after a few minutes, it proved to be unstable.
Never to easily admit defeat, we turned the CPU voltage up to 1.5v, and it was a little more stable, but eventually the computer still crashed. But knocking back down to 290 FSB and 1.475v, the CPU was able to maintain 2.9 GHz with no issues. The temps were 43C idle and 55C load. Honestly, the poor little processor might have a substantially shorter life span running at this extreme overclock, but I don’t think we should care too much. Let us show no mercy.
This has been, by far, the most amazing CPU cooler I have ever come across. I have read about people getting overclocks of 3.2 GHz and above on Athlon64’s using water cooling or other exotic methods, but the prices of those solutions easily get into the hundreds of dollars, are often bulky, need maintenance, and just become troublesome.
To be able to achieve a 40% overclock on air is simply amazing. Heatpipe technology is clearly the way to go for air-cooling heatsinks, and even though this sink is mostly aluminum (all copper in a heatsink this size would be too heavy and too expensive), the Tuniq uses its massive surface area to extreme advantage. The Tower 120 is a high-quality fire-and-forget solution with no necessary maintenance down the line. It is a simple, efficient design which does exactly what it is meant to. Sunbeam deserves the highest praise for this accomplishment.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||