[section_title title=Performance]
Performance
Fitting
Connecting a CPU cooler is always a daunting task when you have to do them regularly, so many are incredibly difficult to assemble that you start to dread any new one, always remembering the pain and small cuts and scrapes instead of those that are a pleasure in their simplicity.
When assembling the Alpenföhn Atlas, though, the process started well. Half following the instructions and half going by intuition it took only a few minutes and the backplate and brackets were fitted to my motherboard with ease. So simple was the process in a fact that there is little to say about it that wouldn’t just involve reproducing the info from the manual. The only warning note that could be a little clearer in the instructions is that the square rubber washer is only fitted to socket 775 installations, so don’t try squeezing it onto your Haswell or AM3+ motherboard.
The heatsink itself is attached to the brackets by a single bar that screws in at each end. This is where installation got a little more tricky; not because of following the instructions but it took a fair bit of force to get the bar attached to both ends. Also, it was necessary to orientate the cooler vertically rather than horizontally which probably impacts cooling slightly as the GPU causes an obstruction instead of cool airflow, but considering the limited space, the fact that I populated all 4 RAM sockets and the rather large water-cooling enabled heatsinks on the motherboard, it’s nice to be able to fit the cooler in any orientation.
Benchmarks
I tested the Alpenföhn Atlas using the following components:
- CPU: Intel Core i7 4770k
- Motherboard: ASRock Z87 OC Formula/AC
- Memory: 32GB (4x8GB) Team Group 1800MHz
- Graphics Card: MSI Gaming G1 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti
- CPU Cooling: Alpenfohn Atlas
- Thermal Paste: Noctua NT-H1
Thermal performance
Thermal performance is judged on four factors overall; the idle temperature at stock and overclocked speeds, as well as the loaded temperatures at stock and loaded speeds. During the testing, whether that be the idle or loaded testing, the system is either in idle or full load for a duration of five minutes before any readings are taken. The average temperature across all four cores is then noted down and used as the results. All room temperatures are recorded beforehand as well as during the test to ensure that the delta temperature is as accurate as possible.
The charts are a little unsettling when you consider the stock processor speed and indeed idle speeds when the CPU is pushed to 4500MHz. That said, the Alpenföhn Atlas certainly redeems itself when it comes to cooling that overclocked CPU when it’s under full load, performing a lot better than most of the other representative air coolers and only a few degrees behind the mighty Noctua NH-D15S.
