Those damn Delta fans are noisy, but heck do they move a lot of air. With an ample supply of fresh air hopefully blowing all the way down into the thin fins of the Icicle 238 it tends to make a fair amount of noise. But hey, this is a Delta fan right?!

As always, you can listen to this heatsink by clicking on the headphones to the right of the waveform images. The Sample is about 10 seconds in length and is stored in MP3 format.

Synthetic Temperature Test Results: *Ranked according to 100W small interface die test results.

FrostyTech Synthetic Temperature Test Platform Results
	Mfg.	Model	Ambient Temp.	27mm large copper block	15mm small copper block		27mm large copper block	15mm small copper block	Thermal pad	No. Fans	Fan Noise	Clip force
				50W	50W		100W	100W
1	Thermal Integration	TI-V77L	26.5	39.1	44.4		57.5	63.6	grey	1	med	med
2	Vantec	CCK-6027D	27.4	45.4	49.6		64.9	73.4	none	1	med	med
3	OCZ	Dominator	26.5	37.7	50.9		52.4	74.2	none	1	loud	med
4	Akasa	Silver Mountain	26.6	46.2	51.5		65.0	76.1	none	1	loud	med
5	Vantec	CCK-6035D-Retail	26.5	44.2	52.8		63.2	77.9	none	1	loud	med
6	Thermaltake	Volcano 6cu+	26.5	40.3	55.3		58.6	84.4	carbon	1	loud	med
7	Akasa	Icicle 238	23.4	43.0	54.7		64.1	83.9	yellow	1	loud	med
8	Spire	5T060B1H3R	26.7	42.7	57.5		64.6	85.1	none	1	low	med
9	Fortis	A92	26.7	45.6	65.8		67.8	97.8	none	1	loud	stiff
				50W	50W		100W	100W

I had expected the Icicle to perform a lot better than these initial results suggest. Given the Akasa name, and the previous experiences with the SilverMountain I have to say I'm a little disappointed in the Icicle 238's performance on the small interface die. Even the performance on the large interface die doesn't suggest better performance on older generation processors.

Perhaps the airflow is being obstructed from moving in between all the fins by the flat-faced surface. It's difficult to tell for sure, but what we can see is that out of the box the Icicle 238 is not attaining the level of performance cooler.