Arctic Cooling Copper Lite CPU heat sink

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Arctic Cooling makes heat sinks and fans that are designed to be very quiet. But how cool are they? Can they help an overclocker who is tired of living with a noisy system? Jkabaseball checks out a new offering from Arctic Cooling, and finds a few caveats.

AC Copper Lite

I remember my Pentium computer. It ran at 75 MHz, but the upside was that it needed just a tiny heat sink to keep it cool. I never worried about the temperature, because it never got overly hot. Nowadays we have CPUs that are too hot for their own good. They have massive heat sinks and fans blowing on them, and still some CPUs overheat. This is why we need good coolers to keep our CPUs cool.

So today we will be taking a look at Arctic Cooling's Copper Lite CPU heat sink and fan for the Socket A. The Copper Lite is the successor to the Copper Silent 2. It has the same performance and noise level, but weighs much less.

Initial thoughts

After reviewing a similar heat sink for the 478 socket, I think this will work well. It will cool better than the Silencer 4 Ultra TCL. There isn’t much difference between them, but this one looks a little more rugged and has a copper core. The AMD stock cooler isn’t that great to begin with, so I’m hoping this does better. I really like the fan design that Arctic Cooling uses. It seems to keep the noise way down while providing adequate air flow. This model doesn’t have the built in thermal sensor like the other one did, so I think that shouldn’t be a problem for us.

I did a little pre-review investigation on this cooler. Arctic Cooling had two graphs up on their site. The first one covers cooling performance. It appears that this cooler will be ever so slightly better than the stock Athlon XP 3200+. Unlike the other Arctic Cooling heatsink we tested, this one will hopefully perform better.

The other graph is of sound. Unlike most coolers, this on is measured in Sones not decibels. In case you don’t know, Sones measure loudness, where decibels measure sound intensity. This cooler should be almost 1/3 as noisy as the stock cooler.

Next: What you get >>
 

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