Anyone with even just a passing interest in overclocking will have heard of the original Thermoengine. This cooler took the industry by storm last year, becoming the benchmark against which all other coolers were compared. Thermosonic have changed their name to Arkua, and sent me not one, but 3 new coolers to review: The not-so-imaginatively named 6228, 7228 and finally the 7528. So how do these babies differ from their predecessor? First up, the 6228.
As you can see it looks very similar to the original thermoengine, only this time with a copper base, textured fins and a 40 CFM YS-tech 7000rpm screamer fan.
Next up is the Arkua 7528, it is much larger than the 6228, and takes a rather unconventional 70mm fan. To say that it resembles the Dr thermal (reviewed here) 'a bit' is the biggest understatement since saying that Adolf Hitler was a bit of a naughty lad.
Finally, the Arkua 7228 which for all intents and purposes looks the same as the one above, except with a 60mm screamer rather than the 70mm fan bolted on.
Here is a pic of the Arkua 6228 with its fan removed, it certainly is a very attractive shape. The larger models look exactly the same, only they are anodised black, and are well... larger. The underside of all of the coolers is nicely machined, although not mirror flat. A bit of lapping might possibly shave a degree or two off, although I doubt it. Did i bother? Hell no!
One minor concern is that like the Dr Thermal, the copper core does not line up with the CPU die. This is not as important as with the Dr Thermal however, since the copper sections and the aluminium surround are completely at the same level.
Test Setup
This is my first cooler review with my new system, which features a totally different CPU, motherboard and case to the previous setup. Therefore, results between the two rigs are not really comparable. For consistency and comparison I have re-tested our best performing cooler - the OCZ dominator - on this new PC.
- AMD Athlon 1.4GHz Processor
- 256MB Cas 2 DDR RAM
- IBM Deskstar 60GXP 60 GB
- Soyo K7V Dragon Motherboard
- 19" Sony Multiscan GDM-400PS Monitor
- Windows XP
- Lian Li PC-60 USB case
The thermal compound used was Arctic Silver II. All temperatures were taken using a thermal probe connected to a Digital Doc 5. Idle temperature was measured by allowing Windows to boot up, and leaving the PC idle until the temperature stopped fluctuating. To measure the temperatures at full load, I used Genome @ home and allowed the CPU to run at full 100% load for 30 minutes. This was sufficient to bring the CPU to its maximum temperature under each cooler.
