Performance Graphs

The system would not go higher than 246 MHz 11x2707 FSB for any of the coolers. The Dual core Opteron just wanted more voltage than the 1.55v the motherboard could supply which was higher than the default BIOS of 1.45v thanks to the voltmod here. The memory was lowered to DDR333 and set to 2T command rate, with AMD Cool and Quiet disabled. All other settings used were BIOS defaults using BIOS 939dm21.50.


At stock settings all the coolers post good numbers.


Add 35 more Watts and they start to feel the heat. Below 50°C is acceptable for the stock cooler.


Pushing 68 Watts above stock only the BW745 stays below 40°C. The stock cooler goes over 50°C with the Hyper6 next at 48°C. The Big Water at 46°C would make it hard for me to add a VGA card in the loop as we see with the graph below.


This graph represents the BW475 at stock FSB(HTT) and a VCore of 1.55V with the VGA card at stock speeds of 520/560 for idle and load using ATITool artifact scanning. The BW745 and GPU idle at 25.0°C but at load the GPU water block has to work with 32.0°C of coolant temperature. Even though the BW745 barely knows the GPU is in the loop, the previous Big Water would be handing off 46.0°C of coolant temperature to the GPU block.


Here we have the max load on the CPU and GPU with all three tests running. Again the BW745 maintains the same temperature to the CPU as it did without the GPU in the loop. Which means the radiators are doing their job well. We also have to remember that I did use the thermal paste supplied with the kit. After benching I applied some Arctic Silver 5 to the BW745 and CPU temps were down 4°C to 36°C, GPU temps down 2°C to 41.0°C under max. load. Taking that into account the BW745 was 16°C lower than the stock cooler and 10°C lower than the previous Big Water.


The water temperature readings from the indicator measure the coolant before it goes back into the liquid tank. The readings show temperatures to be barely above the ambient room temperature at idle and at max. load just 3°C above. The radiators are clearly working well.


Understanding the industry standard for distance sound measurement is taken at 1m and this is what Thermaltake based its numbers on the pump rated at 16 dbA, it scored the lowest at 30 dbA from 60 cm where all sound tests were taken from for the sound test with all fans running at their highest RPM. The P400 from Thermaltake is a very quiet pump. The single radiator fan is the loudest and I can see why they added the speed adjustment. The dual radiator fans are the quietest of the fans tested and being external less noise is obviously better.