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In English
SuomeksiPerformance & Noise
The temperature and noise tests were made in Antec P180B case with the side panel closed and ambient room temperature being 22 C. During the tests the card was running at the stock clock speeds (650/950 MHz).
With two fans running at full speed the Battle-Axe soon proved to be both extremely powerful and noisy. When idling on the desktop the temperature of the GPU remained at steady 39 degrees celcius and on full load (looping 3dmark) the temperature reached 52 degrees, but didn't get any higher.
After seeing the good performance with two fans, one of the fans was simply unplugged. The temperature rise was barely noticeable two degrees, so even further tweaks were made. Also the heatpipes appear to do their job well as the heatsink is evenly warm all around even when only one fan is running. Even the heatpipes on the far sides that aren't in direct contact with the GPU die get very hot.
Being the crafty modders that we are, a splitter cable was soon made that connects the fans in series rather than parallel and thus lowers the voltage of each fan to 6 volts. The supplied splitter cable can be easily modified into one of these if you have a soldering iron, but it would be good from Xigmatek to include something like this to the bundle. At 6 volts the fans run at about 1100 RPM, which significantly lowered the overall noise even compared to a single 12 V fan. While the overall noise level lowered, the fans also started making weird sounds that were like a quiet read noise of a hard disk.
The results are somewhat surprising. Despite the major impact on the noise level, the temperatures barely changed at all. These results lead us to believe that the Battle-Axe couldn't keep the load temperature under 52 degrees no matter how many and how powerful fans were used. This "minimal load temperature" can be caused by the thermal resistance of the heatpipes and the internal resistance of the GPU itself. Keeping in mind the stock cooler on the Gainward 8800GT Golden Sample is one of the best stock coolers we've seen, the Battle-Axe performs very well with the modified power cable.
The cooler was also tested with both fans stopped, but due to the relatively closely fitted and relatively small fins, the heatsink is not going to work passively even with slower cards. With no the 8800GT soon reached 70 degrees on idle and the test was called off.
Conclusion
In our test the Battle-Axe proved to be a very powerful graphic card cooler, but it doesn't come without a long list of down sides. First of all it's huge. This isn't a problem if the user only has one graphic card and doesn't even plan to get any other cards. Anyway it just leaves a feeling of "couldn't have been made any smaller". The second problem is the noisy fans, and unlike the size, this one is a real issue. Easiest and cheapest solution to add a quiet mode to the cooler would be to add a splitter cable similar to the one we made to the bundle. Even with the fans at 6 volts the cooling performance is easily good enough for most graphic cards and the noise level is significantly lower. All in all Battle-Axe is a good cooler if performance is all you're looking for, but if you want your card to be also quieter than with the stock cooler then either prepare to get a fan controller or look somewhere else. |
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