Results Part 1 – “Normal” TIM (MX2)

Here are the results of the first round of testing using the MX-2 TIM. MX-2 is pretty much the standard TIM for watercooling testing because it:
– Has zero curing time
– Is reasonably independent of mount (i.e. reduces human error)
– Is easy to apply and clean
– Easily available and cheap in large quantities

It is not the best TIM in the world. However I will be showing data on all blocks with Indigo Xtreme to show “best case performance data” in part 2. 5 clean mounts were completed on each block with MX-2 and the CPU was loaded for an hour. Temperature data was logged every second. The last 20 minutes of data were averaged and the delta between the average cpu core temperature and the water temperature was used as the most important metric for test results.

Performance Data – Temperature

Here is the raw temperature data for MX-2 showing each data point for each block:

As you can see many blocks were close and this really shows how close they are as it’s hard to
pick out which are better than others. However some blocks were very inconsistent while some
were fairly flat. It’s also hard to tell which block is which if you’re color blind so in order to understand this data we can then process it in various ways. As different people think different methods are fair I’ve included some of the more common ones.

Average of all 5 mounts

This data assumes all mounts are equally valid and you that the average of all 5 is a good
choice for performance metric:

Best out of 5 mounts

This shows the best case performance scenario, however if a water block has poor mounting
repeatability then it may not be a good indicator of performance for you. More on that later:

Average of the middle 3 mounts

This discards the best and worst results as outliers and focuses on the “more” likely data
points.

95% Confidence Intervals

This takes the average and attempts to show how wide the area is around it that you are 95%
likely to hit based upon the standard deviation of the 5 mounts. However bear in mind that the distribution of results is unlikely to be a normal distribution. It is also reliant on only 5 data points so should be taken with a pinch of salt and in the context of the other plots!

This does show is just how close things are.

 
1
2
3
4
5
SHARE
Next articleFractal Arc Mini Video Review

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

13 COMMENTS

  4. So let me see if I understand, I have a Koolance CPU-380i, in order to obtain the best performance should I put the ports perperdicular to the memory slots (- ||||) or in parallel with the memory slots ( | ||||) ?

  6. How much power (in W) does this (CPU – Intel i7-3930K (Unlapped) @ 4.7GHz 1.45Vcore) represent?

    Thanks a lot!

  9. […] As can be seen the best orientation of the Apogee XL is essentially the same as the older Apogee HD. We only tested one rotation of the Apogee HD because it is a diagonally symmetric block. While there will be slight performance differences in rotation, all four rotations must be tested and that’s just silly. For more details on the Apogee HD it was featured in the 2012 CPU block roundup. […]

Comments are closed.