Asus Triton 88 Review - Page 4

Two batches of testing were performed; one on the LGA775 platform, with the Triton pitted against the Tuniq tower, and the second batch of tests was carried out on the LGA1366 platform, with the Triton compared to the stock Intel heatsink that comes with the retail Core i7 920.

LGA775 testing was conducted on a Core 2 Duo E6420 @ 2.56Ghz on an Asus P5B Deluxe, while the LGA1336 testing was conducted on a Core i7 920 at stock frequencies on an Asus P6T Deluxe.

The Triton 88, Tuniq Tower and reference Intel heatsink were all tested with their stock fans. As well as this, the Tuniq Tower and Triton 88 were both tested with a Sharkoon 1000 "Golf Ball", fan, rated at 19 dB(A) and 36.7 CFM to illustrate how the heatsinks fare in low airflow situations. In addition to this, the Triton 88 was also tested with the Tuniq Tower stock fan, allowing for a direct comparison of their cooling abilities. Testing the Tuniq Tower with the fan from the Triton 88 was unfortunately not possible, due to the proprietary nature of the fan bracket used on the Triton.

The thermal interface material (TIM) used on all the heatsinks was the excellent OCZ Freeze, which as well as having very high thermal conductivity, has no cure time (the time it takes for TIM to reach 'stability', giving the best thermal results), this helped to keep test results consistent. If a heatsink came with TIM pre-applied, this was first removed with Akasa TIM Clean.

I recorded the room temperature for each test with a digital thermometer, and thanks to the central heating and small size of the room I was in, I was able to keep the room at approximately 26 degrees Celsius throughout. With a low of 25.3 and a high of 26.7, the room temperature was therefore relatively negligible.

To record the temperatures of each core during testing, version 0.99.4 of CoreTemp was used.

Core Temp v0.99.4

To obtain the idle temperatures, each setup was left for ~20 minutes after starting the machine up. If the temperatures displayed now didn't increase or decrease by more than 1 degree over the course of the next several minutes, then this was recorded as the 'idle' temperature. If the temperature went up or down more than this, I simply waited five or ten minutes for the temperatures to reach stability.

To obtain the temperature of the system under full load, version 1.9 of IntelBurnTest was used with 'No Error Detection' and the 'Maximum Stress Level' set. This was left for 30 runs, with the peak temperatures obtained from the CoreTemp log file for each test (maximum temperature was usually reached after about ten runs, but I wanted to make sure it was as hot as it could be!).

On a side note, just for comparison I tested both platforms with Prime95, and it consistently came out at around 8 degrees cooler than when using IntelBurnTest, which really shows just how more stressful this software is! Simply the best stability testing software you can get.

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Article Navigation:

• Introduction
• Specifications
• Packaging and a closer look at the Triton 88
• Installation
• Testing and Methodology
• Results
• Conclusion