Review: LGA1156 cooler shootout: Arctic Cooling, Corsair, Scythe and Zalman go head-to-head

System setup and notes

Setup notes

With the launch of Windows 7 not far behind us, and Intel's forthcoming Clarkdale CPUs on the horizon, we felt a change of test platform was in order.

With NVIDIA's chipset business being marginalised by their ongoing legal spat with Intel, it makes sense to move away from an NVIDIA core-logic motherboard, such as the eVGA 790i SLI FTW that previously occupied our test platform. Equipped with Intel's latest P55 chipset, and an LGA1156 socket with plenty of room around it, the ASUS P7P55D Premium fills the gap. 

Intel's most powerful LGA1156 chip is currently the Core i7 870, making this an obvious choice for high-end CPU cooler testing. Despite it being a quad-core design with Hyper-Threading, its TDP of 95W is unlikely to bother any high-end heatsink-and-fan combos.

Therefore, we've now introduced an overclocked and over-volted configuration to the tests. This should help us to determine if some of the bullish claims on the coolers' packaging really stand up to scrutiny.

In addition to the memory being updated to accommodate the core-logic and CPU change, the test platform GPU has also been updated to one of the current high-end cards, an AMD ATI Radeon HD 5850.

Housing our kit is the spacious Corsair Obsidian 800D chassis, partnered with Corsair's own HX1000W power supply. The chassis' three standard 120mm fans are all connected via the 3/4-pin motherboard headers. Two of these, the rear exhaust and the bottom intake, are controlled via the BIOS Q-Fan feature which is set to the standard profile. The fan cooling the hot-swap drive-bays, however, is attached to the "PWR_FAN" header. This isn't regulated by the Q-Fan feature in the BIOS and therefore always runs at 100 per cent.

Temperatures are first taken when the system is idle. To put the coolers through their paces, we then stress the system by running the Prime95 torture test for a period of one hour, both during and after which, the ambient, idle and load temperatures are noted.

Finally, we run both sets of tests again, this time with the CPU overclocked and over-volted to see how well they handle a higher heat load.

In the absence of a Core i7 870 retail-boxed PIB cooler, we've utilised a Thermalright MUX-120 which was supplied in the LGA1156 press kits at launch. Unlike the currently available retail examples, this utilises a push-pin retention mechanism, however everything else is the same.

Let's take a look at the contenders.