Testing
Motherboard: Gigabyte Z77X-UD4H
Video Card: Zotac 560 Ti
Memory: Samsung Green MV-3V4G3D/US – 8GB
Power Supply: Corsair TX950
Storage: Mushkin ECO2 240GB Running Windows 7 64bit
Cooling: Alphacool Eissturm Gaming Kit
Case: Phanteks Enthoo Luxe
As always testing was done using Intel Burn Test (IBT) with the AVX instruction set. The reason to use this instead of Prime95 with this setup is that it pushes our i7 3770K a whole lot harder. This gives us a better sense of extreme load temps. Most of the testing was done at the max memory setting for a single pass. While admittedly this in no way would qualify the chip as stable while overclocked, it gives us a realistic idea of what temperatures the CPU will be hitting. Additionally we are going to run 3DMARK Fire Strike Extreme to give you a realistic idea of performance while gaming.
Our baseline was established using a bequiet! Dark Rock Pro 2 with the 3770K on stock settings:
Ambient temps: 22.22°C/72°F
Idle temps: 38.75°C/101.75°F core average
IBT temps one pass max memory: 63.5°C/146.3°F core average
The first thing we did was to test the cooler with stock motherboard/CPU settings:
Ambient temps: 21.38°C/70.5°F
Idle temps: 34°C/93.2°F core average
IBT temps one pass max memory: 54°C/129.2°F core average
*Our ambient temperature is .84°C cooler than baseline, we’ll be adding that to all our results to adjust for the change*
After we add in the variance in ambient temperature we find that the Eissturm Gaming performs significantly better than the baseline cooler at 34.84°C idle vs 38.75°C idle and again it’s leaps ahead running Intel Burn Test at the Maximum memory setting at 54.84°C vs 63.5°C. That’s 8.66°C cooler! With the stock testing out of the way let’s get into some overclocking.
Here are our results for our i7 3770K @ 4.5ghz with 1.248V vCore:
Ambient temps: 21.38°C/70.5°F
IBT temps: 69.5°C/157.1°F with the hottest core hitting 72°C
After a quick adjustment for ambient we find that the Eissturm Gaming kit hits 70.34°C during our OC test. This puts it on the last podium step for our test group. Unfortunately for this kit Corsair’s H150i PRO AIO continues to dominate. While it didn’t quite handle the top level competition for our testing it does perform extremely well and the larger liquid capacity does give it an edge up for temperature saturation. Obviously this is a great kit with a very stable overclock, so we’ll go ahead and run our gaming test.
Ambient temps: 21.38°C/70.5°F
3DMARK: 55.25°C/131.45°F with the hottest single core hitting 58°C
Once again great temps under a pretty standard gaming load.
Based on the temp data we have here this kit is more than capable of taking our hot little 3770k up to 5.0ghz. There is nothing we found during installation or testing to suggest that the Eissturm Gaming kit is anything but a top shelf mid to entry level watercooling kit. It cools with the best of them.