Computing on Demand PC News & Reviews
The back plate Spire provides you with is supposed to replace the stock assembly on your motherboard, and the heatsink mounts your processor via the two oddly placed screws. Yeah, replace the stock assembly, which means you have to remove your motherboard. Needless to say, I am not happy about that. Ok, I can get passed that if it is worth it.
Mounting the heatsink is not so easy after you replace your stock assembly with the provided back plate. You just can’t simply tighten down the screws. This is the tricky part… if you tighten them too much you don’t get a proper seating, and if you don’t tighten them enough you are in the same boat. After approximately 20 minutes of screwing around (literally) I finally got some temperatures that seemed reasonable. The perfect mount seems to be somewhere around where the springs on the screws are barely compressed. There is no indication in the instructions as to which direction the heatsink should be mounted either. I guess it doesn’t matter with a big fat flat copper base. With all that out of the way I can get to the fat of the sandwich, the results.
The test rig is simple, I have my rig: ECS KN1-Extreme, an Athlon 64 3000+, an Albatron GFX 5750, some PQI Turbo 3200 (2×512), a bunch of HDD’s (6 of them), an Antec TruePower 550 PSU, and all sitting inside my Lian Li PC-70. The testing will consist of a couple of numbers. There will be the idle temperature, the ambient temperature (room temperature), and the 100% load temperature. These numbers will be gathered in three runs for each idle and load environments. If you have read our earlier reviews, you will notice a difference in numbers here, I had a bit of bad luck and lost my spreadsheet for all the previous results on past heatsinks, so I will conduct them ALL OVER AGAIN! For these tests, the ambient temperature will be the temperature in the room not the case (as in previous tests). If the numbers look different from the last review, it’s because of this reason. The CPU voltage is at 1.550V (for your reference).
