CPU Air Cooler Round-Up

Modders Inc. has rounded up a dozen CPU coolers today and put them to the test. The round-up features coolers from Thermaltake, Cooler Master, Phanteks, Noctua, Enermax bequiet! and more.

With every contest there are winners and there are losers. However, when it comes to CPU cooler ANY of the coolers listed above will do a good job of keep the CPU cool and going for years to come. None of the cooler listed above failed to meet the standards we put in place nor did they allow the CPU to throttle.

Click to expand...

The results dont make sense.
On the second to last page, the deltas from ambient are listed with different fan speeds.
http://www.modders-inc.com/cpu-air-cooler-roundup/14/

The leader of the pack, the Phanteks PH-TC14CS shows
Normal CPU speed:
Silent Fan:
idle 2.93C, load 18.25C
100% fan:
idle 0.75C, load 18.75C

Overclocked CPU:
Silent Fan:
idle 5.88C, load 36.73C
100% Fan:
idle 4.55C, load 38.23C

How can the load results be worse with the fan at 100%?
And how can the margin be so small if the results are only the wrong way round?
Something else is wrong with these results.

I didnt check other results because they got it so wrong for the pack leader.

edited to fix last result as I showed the wrong one.
But this is even worse lol.

Another discrepancy unless I'm missing something, the TC14PE has twice the surface area and two fans so in every other comparo it performs better than the TC14CS

My guess is the the air temperature inside of case is rising, therefore cooler intake air temperature rises and therefore CPU temperature results are also higher temps.

Classic problem with the way most testing is done.. Using room ambient instead of monitoring the temperature of air actually going into cooler to determine how well cooler works.

This is why I preach monitoring cooler intake air temperature. At least than we know the actual delta of CPU versus air temperature going into cool.. the box the system is and not the air temperature somewhere in the room.. which really has no real value in cooler testing. Now for case testing and system testing room ambient is important, but so is the temperatures inside of case.. of air going into GPU and CPU intakes.

Can't help but notice they didn't test the still quite popular 212 evo...