Review: ARCTIC Alpine 64 Plus VS AMD Stock on Llano A8-3870K
Published by Christian Ney on 04.06.12
Conclusion
| General | + | - | |
| ARCTIC's mainstream cooler Alpine 64 Plus appeared to be better than AMD's stock cooler in any scenario. For 15 $, ARCTIC offers you the opportunity to afford a small cooler that has better cooling capacity and at a lower noise level. Furthermore this cooler features a PWM fan which means that it will be regulated according to the processor's temperature in order to keep your system at a low noise level most of the time. | -
Performance - Price - PWM fan |
- Noisy at 12 V | |
| Installation | + | - | |
| Mounting the cooler is very easy and will take you less than one minute. There is no fixation kit needed as it uses the default one already available on all AMD motherboard. The only tool you will need is a little scredriver to release the fix of the cooler in order to fit it then screw it again to provide a very good pressure onto the processor. Thanks to the low profile design of this cooler you will not find any compatibility issues between the size of the cooler and your memory heatspreader. The Alpine 64 Plus doesn't block any of the DIMM slots so you will be even able to install HyperX modules from Kingston reputed for their huge heatspreader. One thing we don't like is the pre applied thermal paste we always like to have it in a tube and apply it ourselves. | - Easy and robust - Won't create any problems with DDR memory modules | - Pre applied thermal paste | |
| Performance | + | - | |
|
If you drive the Alpine 64 Plus at 12v it is quite noisy but stays 1.13x more silent than the AMD Stock cooler. It was able to keep the processor 5°C cooler and didn't reach the 12v fan speed in PWM mode. So it was even more silent than the stock cooler which was running at 12v in PWM mode with higher CPU temperature. At 7v it was twice less noisy than the AMD one but was offering slightly worse performance. The Llano A8-3870K was 3°C hotter under Prime95. But still it is able to handle heavy load on the processor while offering almost noiseless facility. Without any noise in the testing room the decibel meter was displaying 31.8 dB. When we powered the Alpine 64 Plus on at 7v it was tehn displaying 32.9 dB. |
- Better than AMD's stock cooler - silent at 7v - From 600 up to 2'200 rpm | - 7v Performance | |
| Recommendation | + | - | |
|
The Alpine 64 Plus from ARCTIC is a good alternative to the noisy AMD stock cooler which offers better cooling capacity at a lower noise level good for a desktop computer or an HTPC. |
- Desktop-PC - HTPC |
- Overclocker |
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Author: Chrictian Ney c.ney@ocaholic.ch
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