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#913 - Ultra Aluminum Hard Drive Cooler |
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Written by Zach Jeffers
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Friday, 18 January 2008 |
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Page 4 of 4
Results and Conclusion:
For testing of the Ultra aluminum hard drive cooler with heat pipes, we used the following hardware:
Enclosure: Antec P190 (Noctua NF-S12 intake fans) with included PSU's
Processor: AMD 3800+ X2 (Socket AM2)
Motherboard: ECS
KA3 MVP
Memory: Crucial
Ballistix 2gig (2 x 1gig) DDR2 PC2-6400
Video: Zotac 8600GTS 256mb 256bit DDR3 PCI-E x16
Internal Storage: 2 x 320gig Seagate 7200.10 SATA2 RAID0
Storage with Ultra Cooler: 500gig Seagate 7200.9 SATA2
Optical: Plextor PX-740UF
As this cooler is a passive cooler, we simply installed the drive as previously show and then mounted it within the bottom 5.25” drive bay of our Antec P190 case. The results as tested using onboard SMART sensor with an ambient temperature of 22°C:
As you can see, this cooler actually does work. It lowered our drives temperatures down a whole single degree both at idle and at load. Now this obviously is not a huge performer. This cooler, while building upon a great passive theory, does not hit the target when it comes to real world cooling. As for sound absorption, there really wasn’t any, but then again, there wasn’t any addition noise created by the drive cage.
Honestly this Ultra cooler is just not worth the $50 that it costs after shipping. Does it work? Yes. Is it worth it? No. I would say that this would make a great addition to an acrylic case that you wanted the ‘cool’ factor with, but for the average user that has a solid panel case, it just doesn’t make sense. I give this product a Great rating just on the fact of the excellent build quality, looks, and the fact that it actually did lower our temperatures; even if just a single degree. Our thanks go out to Ultra for their supply of this product for review and their continued support of 3dGameMan.com!
> ADDITIONAL INFO/COMMENTS IN THE FORUMS <
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Pros |
Cons |
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- Great Build Quality
- Works (kinda)
- Easy to Install
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- One Color (Blue)
- Poor Performance
- Horrible Price/Performance Ratio
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