Test results / Introduction

All tests were done with a PPGA Celeron-533 CPU. This CPU was chosen because it is the most power-hungry Celeron CPU ever produced; it emits much more heat than the newer FCPGA CPUs, and therefore is more suitable for accurate performance measurements.  The temperature readings were obtained with the CPU's internal diode. The motherboard used was an ASUS P3B-F. All heatsinks were tested with high quality thermal compound. If a thermal pad was present on the heatsink, it was removed. To show how greatly thermal compound improves performance, we have additionally tested the boxed Intel heatsink with its preinstalled thermal pad.

With "slotket" configurations, large heatsinks often block one or more DIMM slots. Therefore we specify the height of the heatsink in the review, and for reference purposes, we specify how many DIMM slots the heatsink blocks on our ASUS P3B-F test motherboard.

Let's have a look at the test results first:

Heatsink	Temperature
Alpha (FC-)PAL6035 YS Tech fans	34.5
Alpha PEP66 YS Tech fans	34.5
Alpha (FC-) PAL6035 Sanyo Denki fans	35
Alpha PEP66 Sanyo Denki fans	35
Global WIN FKP32	36
Global WIN FDP32	36
Global WIN FEP32	37
Thermaltake Aircooler ("Golden ORB")	37
RDJD P710	41
Intel boxed (w/ thermal compound)	42
RDJD P715 (1)	44
Intel boxed (w/ thermal pad)	50

 
(1) The RDJD P715 has a temperature controlled fan. In the test setup, temperatures did not rise high enough to make the fan spin at maximum speed. Therefore, the obtained measurement does not represent maximum performance under more extreme conditions.