Performance
I won’t hide, I was thinking about tests only on the AMD Ryzen platform with the R3 2200G APU but once I noticed how well the C7 Cu performs on the Intel platform, then I also added it to the comparison.
There are three tests. Idle is just the operating system with some services in the background but without any additional load. Mixed tests base on PCMark 10 benchmark. Max load is what we’ve seen under full load in AIDA64 stability test.
All results are in degrees Celsius. Results on AMD are what is showing ASRock software without the offset so should be real core temperature.
The first test rig is mentioned AMD APU – R3 2200G.
Because of low wattage, both coolers stay at lower fan speed and are quiet. We can still see the difference in temperature. The Cu version of the cooler will generate a bit less noise under full load. It doesn’t change the fact that both coolers are just perfect for the 2200G APU and we won’t see any special difference if we move to larger coolers.
We were able to overclock our APU to 3.95GHz. It was the maximum possible frequency because of the APU itself. It simply can’t run stable above this frequency on ambient cooling.
Since results are more than satisfying then I’ve moved to the more demanding platform which as I already mentioned, wasn’t planned in this review. I’ve seen a couple of forum members asking about possible results on the C7 Cu and higher wattage processors so here are results on the latest, i7-8086K processor and probably the best compact cooler on the market.
Results are nothing special till we take a second look at the cooler size and processor’s wattage. The i7-8086K is specified at 95W TDP, as long as all technologies are working so every power saving, thermal protection, and automatic core adjustment. Our CPU will also boost up to 5GHz on both coolers but as we see, the Cu version performs better. Again it will affect generated noise and also possible higher frequency during work. 6°C is a quite high difference considering that the cooler’s design is the same and only used material is different.
The maximum specified temperature for Intel Coffee Lake processors is 100°C so we are still far from the throttling point.
I don’t think that many users will use this cooler for overclocking but here is one result on the i7-8086k overclocked to 4.7GHz 1.15V in Intel XTU stability test. You can count on about 10-15°C more in Prime95 or AIDA64 stability tests. This is actually stock voltage of the i7-8086K on all cores.
Comparing to the automatic voltage adjustment, manual settings are limiting voltage to 1.15V. If we leave the CPU at auto then it will run at all cores at about 4.3GHz and will set 5GHz on single core what is barely ever possible because of multi-threaded nature of modern systems. At the same time voltage goes much above 1.15V once we leave it at auto so after overclocking we can even see the lower maximum temperature. All depends on our CPU and available options in motherboard’s BIOS.
I think it’s an amazing result for so small cooler. It’s possible to build a really small gaming PC which will also offer a high performance.
