I recently got the sp97 in an attempt to make my system quieter. I had a vantec aeroflow for sometime, and while this was a great cooler, its insessant whine often got on my nerves! The SP97 is a whole new ball game. It actually screws to the motherboard so there is no horrible clip to deal with, although this does mean you will firstly have to have a board with heatsink holes (most modern boards do) and secondly you'll have to remove your motherboard to fit it.
Installation is a little fiddley due to the fact that you need to make sure that nothing is shorting out pins on the motherboard. The SP97 does this with a variety of plastic covers and washers that work quite well. A back plate rests on the rear of the motherboard to accept the screws and this means there is no chance the screws with flex and break the board, which is a good thing! The SP97 really does have a vice-like grip on the CPU.
The SP97 is an upgrade of earlier Thermaltake 900 models. the addtions are primarily heatpipes. These heatpipes originate at the base of the heatsink near the CPU and channel heat away from it directly under the fan for better cooling. All benchmarks I have seen on searches in google have shown this leads to a 3-5'c average temperature drop of the cpu, so the technology seems to work.
The first problem I encountered was with the heatpipes as they do stick out one side. I found they either fouled my mosfets one side, and my northbridge fan on the other. All i had to do was to move the northbridge fan (the little one in the centre of the board) down a cm, and this fixed the problem. Like all large heatsinks, some boards will have a problem with fixing, but there is a comprehensive list of boards and conflicts on the thermalright website. http://www.thermalright.com/
So how does it cool???? My processor is an AMD Athlon 2500XP-m, a mobile processor fitted in a PC. These overclock fantastically well! Mine currently is at 2500 mhz (2.5Ghz) which is equivalent to a normal athlon XP at something like 3700XP. On benchmark tests it performs as well as lower end athlon 64s and equals the performance of a P4 3.2ghz, no mean feat! Of course overclocking to this state means you need to increase the voltage to the processor, and this means more heat!
The air temperature here is currently around 30'c, very warm and a little too warm for my liking! This does mean however that the temps I get will be way above normal as the air passing over the heatsink will be warm too,
At a voltage of 1.675v I am getting a temperature of 44'c and 47'c under load. this is with a 40cfm 92mm fan attached. However last night the temperature dropped here, and the cpu temp dropped too, to about 38'c.
I have also tested the heatsink at normal voltages for the cpu, and the results speak for themselves. 38'c underload, and 34'c idle, amazing considering the air temperature in my case is only a few degrees cooler than this!
Not only does it cool well but it is also one of the quietest I have ever had the pleasure of 'not hearing'. A standard 92mm fan is bearly distinguishable above my 3 hard drives and various case fans.
So to sum up, the SP97 is quiet simply the best heatsink available for Socket A. Coupled with a good 92mm fan (the Vantec tornado is a monster of a fan and would cool it even further although you will need a fan controller to slow it down as it sounds worse than a hairdryer on full revs!), the heatsink performs great and is a must for anyone who wants a quiet system or is into overclocking.
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