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A
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Swiftech MCX-462 The
base is a beautiful thing on the MCX. Swiftech
refers to their finishing process as micro surface finishing.
Very smooth for a flush mate to the processor.
The mirror like shine is not there but I am more than satisfied with the
base’s quality.
Installation The sink itself weights in at 530gms less the fan. To handle this heft, a four point mount to the motherboard it utilized. This keeps the sink where it should be without giving you any gray hair. This mounting method is identical to the MC-462 method that Swiftech pioneered. Alpha has also embraced the Swiftech method of securing heatsinks to deal with added weight. Installation begins with removal of the mainboard so that four lug type mounts may be secured in through the holes around the socket with nylon nuts. We recommend a dab a super glue to secure these nuts in place if you plan on periodic removal of the heatsink. This will keep you from having to remove the mainboard to remove the sink. The MCX-462 is then attached to these lugs by four spring tensioned screws to give the appropriate amount of pressure to hold the MCX in place. With the spring tensioned screws, the springs have specific compression levels that prevent you from over tightening and potentially damaging your CPU. Below is the MCX mounting screws to the left of the mounting lugs as installed on our ABIT KT7A. The second and third shots are from our MC-462 review, which is identical in its mounting to the Alpha and the MCX.
Sink
Specifications
A
word about metals. Temperature
readings are an excellent measurement of gauging heatsink performance.
It is however NOT the sole one. Copper
is being readily used in heatsinks because of its high thermal capacity.
(It can draw and hold more heat than most metals, specifically aluminum.)
The higher the copper content, the higher the heat capacity.
Aluminum on the other hand, while having a lower thermal capacity is able
to dissipate thermal energy (heat) faster than copper.
The same reasons copper absorbs so much heat explain why it holds on to
it more than some other metals. What
this boils down to is that two sinks showing equal temperature readings under
load may not give an equitable overclock. The
sink that has a higher thermal capacity will take your chip higher than another
that holds less thermal energy in spite of having identical temperature
readings. Performance
For
comparison we are going to use the original Swiftech
MC-462 and the Alpha
PAL8045. We decided to go with
a three way because there are only these three sinks at this performance level.
A very exclusive club indeed. Now
our cursory statement… No
two systems will perform identically, or for that matter, there will be
variations within a single system to some degree within a single system
depending on several factors. Hence
our results may end up being a little better or a little worse than the results
you may get in your own box. We used the exact same Delta SHE fan on each heatsink. To illustrate a point about our cursory remark, we had two SHE fans here and one outperformed the other by 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit (2.94 degrees Celsius) on the MCX. This is exactly why we say no two systems will test alike. The Swiftechs had the fan mounted as they suggest, in the blow position while the Alpha was setup in a suck position. All measurements were obtained by a thermal probe mounted onto the silicon of the chip so that the probe tip touched the CPU core. Our load temperatures were attained by running the CPU stability tester program for thirty minutes. The reported results are the average of three runs per product. Thirty minutes was given between test for the system temperatures to stabilize to normal. Arctic Silver thermal goop was used as our interface material. Ambient room temperature was 76 degrees Fahrenheit and at no time did this base temperature deviate more than 0.5 degrees F.
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pages Copyright © 2000 - 2009 by R. Dean Barker.
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