120mm Water Cooler Round Up w/ Cooler Master, Scythe and Zalman

By Shane Higgins

Test system and procedure

LR Test system x264 screen shot

To test the coolers I used the x264 benchmark stress the CPU. I used this in place of Prime95 due to the fact that the floating point benchmarks like Prime95 are really hard on Intel Haswell CPUs, and tend to mess with the integrated voltage regulator that now resides on the chip. I did 4 runs of the x264 benchmark and then averaged the temps. Temperatures were recorded with Coretemp. The idle temps were taken after the system set at the desktop for 30 minutes. The ambient temperature was kept at 72F (22C) for all testing.

The test system

LR Test System

Intel Test Platform
Component Brand/Model Pricing
Processor Intel Core i7 4770K Click Here
Motherboard Gigabyte GA-Z87X-OC Force Click Here
Memory Kingston HyperX Beast Click Here
Video Card EVGA GTX 660 Click Here
Hard Drive Corsair Force GT 90GB SSD Click Here
Power Supply NZXT HALE90 750w Click Here
Chassis Thermaltake Chaser MK-1 Click Here
Operating System Windows 7 Professional (64Bit) Click Here

LR Test system CPUZ screen shot

CPU used in the test system is the Intel Core i7 4770k. The processor will be run at stock settings with the Gigabyte GA-Z87X-OC Force motherboard running default settings as well.

LR Test system GPUZ screen shot
The GPU used in the system is an EVGA GeForce GTX660 with ForceWare 327.23 video card drivers.

LR Test System Corsair SSD

Hard drive use is the Corsair Force GT 90GB SSD.

LR Test System Gelid GC Extreme Thermal Paste

Thermal paste used is Gelid GC Extreme