Titan Acoustical and Surface Roughness Tests - TTC-CW9TB/SC FrostyTech Review

Surface Roughness Comparator:

Surface finish is an important factor that we all look for when holding a new heatsink. Flipping a cooler over to see how well the base has been machined is a quick way to judge the attention to detail that was put into making it. The following FrostyTech Surface Roughness Comparator offers a concise cross section common machine surface finishes. Not every heatsink base will fit into the envelope of this gage, but it does offer a very handy set of representations.

This commercially available gage has 22 machined surfaces from 2 to 500 microinches; Lapped (2, 4, and 8 µ" RA), Ground (8, 16, 32, and 63 µ" RA), Blanchard Ground (16 and 32 µ" RA), Shape Turned (32, 63, 125, 250, and 500 µ" RA), Profiled (63, 125, 250, and 500 µ" RA), and Milled (63, 125, 250, and 500 µ" RA).

FrostyTech Surface Roughness Comparator

the base of a heatsink plays an important role in how well the cooling apparatus interfaces with the processor. poor surface roughness will affect a good heatsink just as much as a good surface finish will improve thermal conductivity. in an effort to put a more quantitative spin on the comments we provide about base finishes, frostytech has begun using a surface roughness comparator.

move your mouse over the image above to see an example at right. numbers are in microinches, and finishes from 2 microinches to 32 microinches are excellent-to-good.

Evaluation Notes:

The Titan CW9TB/SC heatsink had a surface roughness of approximately 2L, which is considered excellent. Unfortunately, surface flatness is fairly poor over the area which contacts the core of the Pentium4 processor.

Acoustic Samples: Listen to this Heatsink!

The Titan CW9TB/SC is moderately noisy under power, but I suspect it will get pretty much lost in the noise from a typical PC. To listen to this heatsink for yourself in operation, be sure to click on the little headphones icon below and download the Acoustic Sample MP3 file.

(high) FrostyTech Acoustic Sampling Chamber

Standard Waveform view of a 10 second recording. Click on the headphones to listen to an MP3 recording of this heatsink in operation.

Sound Level Measurements:

Listening to the actual noise a heatsink makes allows you to hear what pure numbers alone cannot get across. To further emphasize FrostyTech's reliance on cold hard facts when evaluating a heatsink, we also take Decibel readings with a sound level meter. These results may be higher than the manufacturer's listed specs, but then again these are real world measurements. Measurements are made on the dB (A) scale.

FrostyTech Sound Level Results

- Manufacturer Model Noise Level Scale

TS Heatronics NCU-1000 passive N/A

Verax P16 35.3 dB

Spire SP420B8 40.2 dB

Zalman CNPS7000-Cu 41.7 dB

ArcticCooling SuperSilent4 Pro 41.8 dB

Zalman CNPS6500-AlCu 47.4/28.9 dB

Zalman CNPS7000A-Cu 42.2 dB

Intel Socket 478 42.5 dB

CoolJag JVC661A 43.9 dB

Arkua 8456X-8T 46.5 dB

Evercool NW9F715CA 47.3 dB

Intel Stock 3.06GHz 47.5 dB

Aopen ACP4LC 48.7 dB

Arkua Q85X-7J 49.0 dB

Arkua 848X-6B 49.3 dB

Titan CW9TB/SC 50.5 dB

Taisol CEP426151A 50.7 dB

Scythe Kamakaze 51.0 dB

Arkua 838T-7G 51.7 dB

JMC 401100 53.0 dB

Dynatron DC1207BMW 53.0 dB

Spire SP411C5 53.2 dB

Dynatron DC1207BMY 53.2 dB

Dynatron DC1207BMX 53.4 dB

Thermal Integration (high) TI-V7035TN 53.6 dB

Zalman CNPS5700D-Cu 53.8 dB

Globalwin VA476 54.2 dB

Dynatron DC1206BMV 55.1 dB

AVC 117140 56.1 dB

Taisol CEP447181 56.8 dB

Taisol CCP445172 57.5 dB

Cooljag (high) CJC66IC-A 59.1 dB

Dynatron DC1U-B02 62.2 dB

Coolermaster IHC-H71 64.4 dB

Thermalright (high) SLK-900U 67.2 dB louder

With a digital sound meter in hand, we recorded a noise level of 50.5 dBA from about 12" away. This places the Titan CW9TB/SC in the moderate to somewhat noisy area of the list. All things considered, it will likely not be audible outside of the case in most environments. Up next, the thermal results!

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