Performance
As I mentioned, the Evercool Transformer 4’s fans run at 1000 RPM, and it makes them totally silent.
I compared the Transformer 4 to the Kingwin XT-1264, which costs much less than the Evercool cooler, but it cools very well for its price.
I monitored CPU temperatures with Easy Tune 6, Gigabyte’s software overclocking and hardware monitoring utility. Idle temperatures were taken with the system sitting idle for 30 minutes, load temperatures were taken with the CPU running at 100% load for 30 minutes.
CPU load was attained by using Prime95 version 25.8 64-bit. The “Torture Test” of this latest version of Prime95 not only utilizes all four cores, it also utilizes the i7’s four virtual cores, maxing out all 8 threads. I used the “small FFT” setting as I wanted to stress only the CPU and not the memory.
First I tested temperatures at stock clock of 2.66gHz.
So far so good, but the real test comes when overclocking the CPU. I did my standard cooler testing overclock, taking the i7 920 from 2.66gHz to 3.86gHz. This isn’t my highest overclock, which is just over 4.0gHz, but it is a very healthy overclock, and requires the Vcore and QPI voltage both raised to levels that really heat up the CPU.
I couldn’t believe it, the Transformer 4 took my CPU to nearly its shutdown temperature, which is 90C. Both fans were spinning just fine, everything looked cool from the outside. I shut the system down and pulled the cooler to make sure the cooler was seated properly and the thermal compound was spread properly. Everything looked ok, I tried again, and the same thing happened. So I guess regardless of its large size, the Transformer 4 just isn’t quite cooler enough to cool an i7 at an extreme overclock.
So, I brought my overclock down to a more manageable level, at 3.2gHz. I was able to bring both the Vcore and QPI voltage down a fair amount for this overclock.
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