Pentium 4 560 Installation and Performance (3.87GHz)
MSI 915P Neo2 Platinum: Intel P4 560 (18x215), 2 x 512MB
Corsair TWINX PC5400 Pro, ASUS AX800XT, 160GB Seagate SATA 7200.7.
As we've stated many times here at VL, the P4 Prescott
is very difficult to cool when overclocking with air-cooling.
Water has always been our recommendation.
The LGA775 installation brackets are a $12.99 option for the CPU-300 and includes a number of items for Pentium 4 installation. The first step will be to screw in the clip retention brackets into the motherboard. You'll have to be careful about how you align them as the CPU block requires some clearance. Another tip is to pre install the CPU prior to this step as the brackets will likely interfere with the CPU retention bar (this was the case for us).
Editor's Note: We didn't receive instructions for the P4 setup but Koolance did offer this in a recent email: The LGA 775 Rails can be aligned either way, but if
perpendicularly to the motherboard's length, they should avoid the
issue of not being able to use the CPU locking bar.
I'm not sure how many motherboards will be affected by this but with the MSI and ASUS motherboards we used, the capacitors interfered with the CPU-300's installation. Koolance includes a copper disc that should be placed on top of the CPU in this case which will elevate the CPU-300 from the motherboard. CPU should have paste, and the side of the disc that makes contact with the water block as well.
Going up against the Koolance PC3-720SL for our
Pentium 4 560 tests will be the PolarFLO TT water block, which
has been coupled with asetek's Antarctica cooling components.
This includes a Hydor L30 pump, dual 120mm radiator, WaterChill
reservoir and 1/2" OD tubing. The case used for the ensemble
kit will be the Ultra Dragon Blue case which nearly mirrors the
PC-720SL case in terms of case cooling design, including dual
80mm fans. The PSU used for all tests will be Cooler Master's
RealPower 450W PSU. Arctic Silver 5 was the thermal paste of choice
for our testing. This setup should provide as close to apples
to apples in terms of hardware configuration.
Prime95 was run for nine hours, with Folding
@ Home running in the background everyday for four days to
load the system and allow the thermal paste to even out. During
the actual tests, we ran SiSoft Sandra's CPU Burn for 15 minutes,
with Folding @ Home running in the background. Ambient room temperature was maintained at 23°C/74°F.
Tests were run with both setups in "Silent" mode (low speed fan settings) and "Performance" mode (high speed fan settings).
Idle Temperatures in °C
Load Temperatures in °C
For both our Idle and Load tests, the PC3-720SL was outperformed by the asetek and PolarFLO TT tag team. Since the PC3-720SL had an extra "layer" due to the disc, we reran the test with the PolarFLO TT in place of the CPU-300 and improved performance by a couple degrees, though not enough to overtake the asetek setup.
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