If you are into overclocking, you are going to need something a little bit better than the Intel retail heatsink, but that usually costs more than what you probably want to spend. Or, we should say "costed", because Arctic Cooling has on sale a couple of heatsinks that are rather cheap and could just do the job.

At only 15$, the price of the Alpine 7 is hard to beat, and it is a good replacement of the Intel "in-box", but the one that really shines is the Freezer 7 Pro. It costs only ten bucks more, and it's difficult to find a heatsink that provides better performance, even if you go all the way up to the high end (Thermalright Ultra 120 eXtreme). And for the price of one of those, you get two Freezer 7 Pros.

Looking at the specifications, we find that 90 watts are all the Alpine 7 is good for, while the Freezer 7 Pro can cope with as much as 130 watts. That basically leaves the Phenom X4 out of the question (as well as some older Core 2 Quads). But rest assured, if you don't plan on some extreme 4 GHz overclock, it's more than enough for a Q6600. After a quick test, I was getting lower temperatures at 3.33 GHz than with the stock heatsink at default speed!

Take some expert german engineering knowledge, add in the latest NVIDIA 9800 graphics card, a splash of pure copper and some water and you have the latest watercooling solution from Aquagrafx. Their new Aqyagrafx 9800 GX2 cooler should be available by the time you read this and we have to say, it looks mighty fine. The cooler is made of 2 consecutively circulated coolers made of pure copper (99.9%). The coolers are extremely thin and therefore pretty light, so the total weight is under 800g. The aquagrafx achieves excellent temperatures and cools both GPUs, mosfets, Ram and the bridge chip. The copper elements are connected via a terminal made of Delrin. The connectors of the aquagrafx are G 1/4".

Pricing for the cooler will  be 129.90 Euro and for a graphic card 9800 GX2 with mounted cooler and warranty 619.90 Euro.

Their hard disk series 'Aquadrive' also has a new arrival to the stable. The aquadrive quad copper edition.

This hard disk cooler can take up to 4 hard disks which are cooled and decoupled very well in the completely encapsulated case. Merely three 5 1/4" bays are used and the cooler contains a fluid reservoir at the same time, this one has a greater capacity than the aquatube. The new hard disk series also uses delrin as case material which takes vibrations better than aluminum due to its structure. Solid copper plates are used inside. Their weight approximately corresponds to the weight of an aquadrive dual aluminium. In turn these are surrounded by a water jacket which also takes and lowers vibrations. The whole aquadrive is kept in the already approved rubber components which decouple it from the case. The inside of the case is provided with a special layer covering to take high-frequency noises. 
 
To be able to take SATA and ATA plates without too big case openings, the openings are executed ex works for SATA as of now and can be used for ATA drives by breaking them out. The integrated fluid reservoir is filled by an enclosed squeeze bottle at the front. By two tubes the two reservoirs are communicating with each other so that the filling level compensates itself. The current water level can comfortably be read in the right profile. A little red ball indicates the fill level. The aquadrive quad is available for EUR 139.90.

For more information and to purchase these products, head on over to the Aqua Computers website. 

Last month's Consumer Electronics Show continues to provide us with new products. In this case, a new one presented by OCZ Technology Group that should appear shortly on their webpage (the image above still depicts the current incarnation of their Flex technology).

Continuing with their role as a leader in the high performance memory market, OCZ has improved on it's already fantastic heatsink design. Flex 2, offers superior cooling capacity due to dedicated liquid channels. The previous version channelled water over the top of the module, whereas now the liquid goes over the chips themselves (on both sides). The number of tubes gets doubled and reaches a total of eight for a two module memory kit.

Because of the need for the coolant to run directly above the memory chips, heat spreaders are thicker than usual, so you can forget about installing them in continuous slots. This limits the amount of modules to only two, but you will be relieved by not having to deal with 16 water connections.

Link: Legit Reviews.

I could have titled this "Watercooling on a budget", if not for the fact that this liquid cooling kit costs more than $100. Looking at the bench results, the only good thing to be said about it... it's not in the numbers. But if you search for an easy installation, the Big Water 760i may be for you and it's small enough to be accommodated inside most ATX cases. If it's your first trip into the wet stuff this ones all about baby steps and you will find its setup as easy as they come. Apart from that, I don't see any real usefulness for this product. It doesn't improve the performance of a good air heatsink/fan combination and I wouldn't advise you to show it off at a LAN party. Well unless you like the sounds of laughter.

Compared to the Big Typhoon, a decent heatsink but not among the best ones, it turns out to be noisy (both the water pump and the fan) and lets the processor reach temperatures up to 14ºC higher (while still making more noise).

Link: Xbit-labs.

The guys at Club Overcloker have compared several thermal compounds using a Q6600 stepping G0 processor as the source of heat.

The test participants are: Artic Silver 5, Ceramique, AI Technology's Cool Silver and the IC Diamond 7 Carat. As  a point of reference, the stock grease from the Intel retail heatsink was also included (as well as the heatsink itself).

Under load, if any can claim a victory it should be Intel's stock. I guess this just shows how difficult it is to get a clear benchmark result with this kind of products. It could also mean that Intel has improved the paste significantly.

At idle, AS5 wins by a large margin, even though the 200 hours that are recommended for it to settle were not observed.

Bigger, heavier, more fins, more heatpipes... wider heatpipes? Yes, there are also manufacturers who will try this approach in the not-so-everlasting search for the ultimate in air cooling. In this case, the two models reviewed feature heatpipes measuring 8 mm in diameter instead of 6mm.

As their performance indicates, increasing the width of the heatpipes is not definitive, but it sure helps both heatsinks to keep up with the current champ (the Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme). If you get price into the equation, the Xigmatek HDT-S1283 wins thanks to it's own inexpensive fan which almost matched the Scythe Minebea 4710KL-04W-B29 fan. The heatsink is cheaper in itself, but if you add the price of an aftermarket fan (for Thermalright's offerings) the gap is considerable.

All in all, air cooling can get you very decent results with today's most powerful CPUs

Link: X-bit labs.

At techPowerUp, you can find a detailed article about Thermalright's latest product for the GPU cooling market. It's compared to Zalman's top solution and the stock cooler. No noise figures are given, but load temperatures for the GPU are as follow:

Thermalright HR-03 Plus (120 mm fan): 54ºC
Zalman VF1000 LED & RHS 88 (high fan speed): 64ºC
Inno3D Stock (100% fan duty cycle): 69ºC

The Thermalright HR-03 Plus pulls ahead of the competition and it's not even using a high performing 120 mm fan here, but a medium performance Papst 120 mm. If you prefer to go the silent route, you can always attach a Nexus Real Silent 92 mm.

Note: the two mounting clips inlcuded are for using with a 92 mm fan. For bigger fans you have to get creative.

Browsing through forums I found this post that, although it's a couple of months old, gets to be the only comparison between the two behemoths from Thermalright I've seen so far. It may not be a professional review, but I ask you: what is "professional"? This is so much better than most of the cooler articles I usually read that it puts them to shame.

If you ever wondered about any of these two heatsinks, any question you might have it's answered here. From fan choice to number of fans used in any distribution possible. From pressure mounting to lapping. The only thing I miss here is a full set of benchs iniside the case, since it's in this fashion than most of us will be using any of the two anyway.

In the end, the conlcusions would have probably been the same: both perform almost identically, but the more expensive IFX-14 allows for an easier installation of multiple fans, so you can get a silent configuration. "Almost", here, means that the bigger heatsink has more potential when adding 120 x 76 mm fans, but the gains are so small we are just hitting the limits of air cooling with any of the two heatsinks and a powerful fan like the Delta 120 x 38mm FFB1212VHE.

Artic Silver 5 has been the "de facto" leader of the thermal grease sector for quite some time, the point of reference, if you will. Every now and then a new product chalenges this status, but although some seem to do the feat, it's still considered the best. It's time for AiT to try their shot at dethroning the king, and Cool Silver is the weapon they intend on using.

The folks at Tweak News have pitted it directly against Artic's finest and the results are full of promise: one celsius degree less at idle and two to four under load depending on your heatsink choice. The heatsink is important here, because I've seen very different results from the same thermal solution when you use Intel's retail or an aftermarket heatsink. If we assume that somebody  who spends $6.99 on the paste isn't going to use the retail, then four degrees isn't anything to dismiss.

Almost as interesting as the possibility to beat Artic Silver is the statement made by AiT that their Cool Silver has "negligible" electrical conductivity. The last compound I saw beating AS5 was even more dangerous and liquid (Coolaboratory Liquid Pro), so a litte peace of mind here is welcolme.

In the current issue of the german magazine Hardwareluxx (06/2007) splashed around with13 water coolers in their labs and found a new champ for quadcore processors. The cooling performance of the cuplex XT di from Aqua Computers stood out as a premium solution for cooling the current lineup of CPUs on the market. At the temperature difference between CPU and water, the cuplex XT di led the field by 4.6K compared to the nearest runner-up.

Interestingly, Hardwareluxx found that other coolers partly offered a higher flow, however, they were not able to keep up with the cooling performance of the cuplex XT di.

Hardwareluxx states, " ... the cuplex XT di deserves our excellent hardware award. In measuring it showed intoxicating results, which is crowned by a very good machining and a very nice design. You get the best cooling solution for a non elitist price."