Noise is becoming a very important factor for most people when building a PC, the last thing you want when building your new plaything is to have the excellent soundtracks for modern games drowned out by irritating fan noise. In my current test rig I have a stock Intel fan which isn’t the quietest thing in the world when the CPU starts getting hot and its certainly louder than AMD’s stock fan so I was looking forward to trying todays review product and hopefully regaining the whisper quiet PC experience I was accustomed to.

The Speeze Chillmax

Speeze are not a company I personally had heard about before, certainly it wasn’t one I had come across on any of the online retailers I frequent and so this is one of the few products sent to us which arrives with no preconceptions on any aspect of the unit.

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The box that the Chillmax arrives in is pretty plain, with a basic image of the product contained within. Other than the product images and branding there are a few specifications on the unit printed on the side.

As far as bundled essentials go Speeze supply the two things you are going to need, thermal paste and an instruction manual. Its always a good sign when you receive a heatsink that has paste rather than a rubbish quality thermal pad. In terms of volume the paste supplied should last you several cpu installs so also a plus point there.

Installation of the unit is really very self explanatory however we had a glance at the manual to see what is included for the novice PC builder. Having read through the manual we didn’t have any complaints as every step was clearly described.

The unit itself is rather stylish looking and will look the part in any case…

The fan attached to the top of the unit is a 12V DC model which measures 80 by 80 by 25mm. Its nice to see also that the wires which connect the fan to the motherboard are sealed which keeps cable clutter to a minimum. The fan is set to run at 2700rpm and is not variable. Running at this speed airflow moves at 34.46cfm and the noise produced is 22dBa. Those specifications place it right in the mainstream cooler wise however the fan is only part of the design…

Beneath the fan is of course the heatsink and Speeze have moved on from the traditional fins only design to a newer heatpipe design which should be far more effective in removing heat from the CPU. The cooling parts of the heatsink are of course all copper.

Here is the side view of the heatsink showing how the heatpipes connect to the cooler. You can also see clearly in this picture how the unit is attached to the system. The black plate unscrews from your heatsink and is placed on the underside of the motherboard, the screws then pass through the mounting holes on the Socket 775 motherboard and screw into the plate.

Turning the unit on its side to look at the base we can see the copper plate which is used as the contact with the CPU.

Performance

The following figures were taken on an Asus P5RD1-V motherboard using a 800fsb socket 775 Intel P4 running at 3.6ghz. Idle temps were taken after an hour of the system running on the desktop, load temps were the maximum temps registered during a video encoding session.

dont have flash installed? click here for a jpeg version of the above chart

Conclusion/Thoughts

Overall we were impressed by the Speeze Chillmax, installation was possible with only a screwdriver (needed to remove the motherboard) required. As mentioned earlier in the article the manual that comes with the unit is well written and easily understandable even for novice PC builders. There were a few down sides to the unit though and these were that it isn’t a powerful enough cooler to cool the more recent 1066fsb Pentium 4’s, when one of those was installed the temperatures rose considerably and the system eventually powered down to protect the CPU. This was of course using the unit outside its specifications which are up to and including the 3.8Ghz 800fsb P4. A minor issue we encountered was that one of the screws to attach the unit broke(snapped) after a few installs, whilst this is probably just a case of bad luck in our sample we would suggest that you take care when installing the Chillmax, just incase.

Of course these minor issues are more than cancelled out by the fact that the unit is an excellent performer. Not only does it cool more efficiently than the stock Intel cooler, it is also much quieter. At all times we were hard pushed to hear it operate at all in our test system, even when the only other fan running was the PSU fan. This is a great achievement by Speeze. Add to the great performance the fact that the unit looks rather nice and you have a product which we highly recommend.

Thanks to www.bluesharksystems.co.uk for supplying our review unit.