Hardware Review
SPIRE COOLER VERTICAL 2
Heat pipe based CPU coolers have been very effective cooling solutions for newer and faster CPUs. Not only they effectively dessipate heat, they are also very acousticly quiet. Tonight we'll take a look at Spire's 2nd version of their Verticool cooler. We would like to thank the Spire team for letting us review their cooler.
Out of the box, the cooler appeared to be well built. From the fan to its copper based heatpipes. The Verticool 2 is designed for Intel Socket 775 and AMD socket 754,940 and 939. Spire have provided the necessary bracket to support the socket types listed above. We will be using the following testing rig to examine how effective the cooler is compared to a stock cooler:
| Asus A8N SLI Motherboard |
| Athlon 64 3700+ |
| 2GB Crucial Ballistix DC Kit PC4000 |
| ATI Radeon X800 Pro 256MB PCI-E |
| 2 x WD 80GB SATA RAID 1+0 Configuration |
| Silverstone ST56F 560w PSU |
| LG 16x DVD-RW |
| Dimensions | Heatsink: 95x65x100mm(lxwxh) 12VDC Fan: 80x80x25mm |
| Bearing | Ball bearing |
| Rated Speed | 2300 RPM +/-10% |
| Rated Power: | 1.56w |
| Noise Level: | 19.0 dBA |
| Noise Level: | 0.5 Sone |
| Air Flow: | 25.78 CFM at 2,300 RPM |
| Life hours: | Ball: 50.000 |
Click the images to see the enlarge version
Going by the specs, it looks like the fan will be very nice and quiet with a rating of 19.0dBA with an airflow of 25.78 at 2300RPMs. The cooler is also UV reactive and should look well on a windowed case. I also like the arrow on top of the cooler which points out the direction of its airflow. Installation in our Asus board was very simple and straight forward. Now that we've completed our installation, it's time for us to get some temperature readings off the CPU. We will use an external CPU temperature monitor to see how well it cools our CPU down. We will test the CPU cooler under default CPU speed of 2.2 GHz and then under the overclocked speed of 2.75GHz.
When all of our tests have been completed, there was no surprises. The Verticool 2 performed extremely well and kept our AMD 3700 well under thirty degrees and just about thirty degrees when our CPU was overclocked. Here are the results:
Click the images to see the enlarge version of the charts
The Spire Vertical 2 cooled down our overclocked A64 3700+ to an amazing 29 degrees even at full load. With the effective cooling, our CPU might match up well with the more expensive A64 FX with our CPU running at 2.75 GHz. We were very impressed with the effective cooling it brought to our system and it's overall silence under normal operation. It's only fitting to give this cooler our recomendation as well as a score of 9 out of 10. If you want to get more information on this cooler, please kindly visit Spire's website. You can also discuss this review in our forum with our other memebers.
