Danamics LM10 - Liquid metal put to the test - Test system and methods

Cooling - Published on Thursday, 04 December 2008 01:00 Written by Andreas Galistel

The test system is a very plain one to say the least, and we've chosen to test inside a case, much thanks to Danamics insisting us to do so, claiming it would simulate real-life performance much better, which doesn't make our testing as synthetic as usual.

As you may notice, our test programs to be used are sparse, but we believe that testing in two separate applications with four different airflow levels will be enough. Arena 1.99b3 is something as unusual as a chess simulator that supports up to eight threads and also is supposed to push your CPU pretty hard, so we decided to test it, in our tests it's used to run for five minutes. Stress Prime needs no real introduction for the enthusiast, we let the computer run for 45 minutes and note whatever temperature is achieved by this CPU stressing application. Each fan is used for every test with both the reference cooler and both the ReturnPower and PowerBooster options for the LM10.

We've also decided to skip water cooling during these tests, since our Zalman ZM-WB4 seemed to be the limiting factor in our otherwise nice system, preliminary tests showed a 5-7 degrees Celsius increase compared to today's reference cooler.

Editor's note:
During our testing of the LM10 prototype we used an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 overclocked to 4.0GHz to create a high load, however it turned out to be too much for all coolers involved and very few people actually own a processor like that. Instead we decided to go with a more common test setup, but we still wanted something with a higher load for one part of the review so we will be overclocking to the highest stable frequency and run the tests again. Also, LM10 is meant to shine in crowded and hot environments where heatpipes are not optimal. Per request we may update the results with other processors.

Let the testing commence.

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