Monday, June 11, 2001

Introduction

Every once in a while, a new heatsink hits the market that stands out just enough to demand a review. This time around, it's the Vantec FCE-6254OD. Gifted with an imposing frame, and capped with a super Delta fan capable of 7000rpm, the FCE-6254OD is a worthy beast, and we're happy to be taking a look at it today.

Description

As you can see from the nearby image, the corners of the main section of the FCE-6254OD are raised so as to ease installation by avoiding contact with the many capacitors that tend to inhabit the space around a mobo's CPU socket. As a fact, thanks to its shape, I have been abla to fit this HSF on all socket A mobo I have been testing since the last 2 months. A grill on the bottom also prevents the casual insertion of objects (such as wires, pencils, or fingers) into the area of the fan itself. Finally, on the side of the unit is the retention mechanism - which we have to say is quite effective and easy to use.

Installation

The first thing to do before installing any heatsink, of course, is to apply a thin layer of thermal paste to the contact surface. From there on, installation is pretty straight forward. Do make sure though that the amount of pressure exerted by the clips isn't too high, so as to avoid snapping the retention pins off the CPU socket.

The tests

The tests we performed were simple. In order to really heat-up our CPU, we set it to run the Quake 3 demo for an hour for each test. In each case, an AMD Athlon "T-Bird" 1GHz was used, and the final temperature was compared to that obtained using the stock heatsink.

Conclusions

As you can see from the results, the Vantec FCE-6254OD is incredibly efficient. In fact, it was able to reduce the CPU temperature by an astounding 30 degrees relative to the performance of the stock cooler.

In all practical terms, this is the ideal setting for some serious Overclocking.

One little point against this unit is the sheer amount of noise it makes. That's pretty much inevitable considering the high speed of the fan unit, and the 60mm monster blades on the Delta can emit a disagreeable amount of noise from an open case. Thus, user's who plan on installing a FCE-6254OD unit in their system should be ready to adapt to a higher-than-average amount of white noise while their system is running. However, one gets used to the noise faster and easier than we could imagine.

For more information on the FCE-6254OD, please visit Vantec