Spire Surface Roughness and Acoustic Comparisons - Verticool SPA49B0 FrostyTech Review

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 Spire SPA49B0 heatsink has a surface roughness of approximately 8 microinches, which is considered very good. Move your mouse over the tabs above and look at 8G for an approximate example of what this surface finish looks like.

Acoustic Samples: Listen to this Heatsink!

With the Spire Verticool SPA49B0 powered up, noise levels are low frequency, and not very noticeable. It will work well in any application that calls for a mainstream Socket A AMD heatsink. To listen to this heatsink in operation, be sure to click on the little headphones icon below and play the sample MP3 file.

FrostyTech Acoustic Sampling Chamber - Low

Standard Waveform view of a 10 second recording. Click on the headphones icon 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:

Scythe NCU-2000 passive Quiet

Verax P16Cu 31.5 dB

Spire SP420B8 40.2 dB

Verax (high) P17CuX 40.8 dB

Zalman CNPS7000-Cu 41.7 dB

ArcticCooling SuperSilent4 Pro 41.8 dB

Zalman CNPS7000A-Cu 42.2 dB

Spire SPA49B0 44.5 dB

Evercool NW9F715CA 47.3 dB

Scythe SCKK1000 47.4 dB

Intel Stock 3.06GHz 47.5 dB

AVC Z7H2403012 48.2 dB

Aopen ACP4LC 48.7 dB

Gigabyte PCU22-SE 50.5 dB

Scythe Kamakaze 51.0 dB

Verax Polargate AL S 52.5 dB

Jetart JAP416A 52.8 dB

Asus Crux P4 XB7N (H) 52.9 dB

JMC Products 401100 53.0 dB

Coolermaster (high) Hyper6 KHCV81U1 54.1 dB

Thermal Integration TI-A8736N 54.8 dB

Scythe (high) SCSM1000 55.5dB

Alpha S-PAL8952 55.8 dB

AVC 117140 56.1 dB

Vantec VP4-7245 56.8 dB

Taisol CEP447181 56.8 dB

Coolermaster (high) Jet4 58.9 dB

Cooljag JACE2DC/180 59.2 dB

Cooljag E44C/180 60.9 dB

Cooljag 2QC/180 61.1 dB

Dynatron DC1U-B02 62.2 dB

Gigabyte (high) PCU31-VH 63.7 dB

AOpen ACP4SH 67.1 dB Louder

Listening to the pitch of heatsink's fan is one thing, but how loud is the Spire SPA49B0 in the real world? According to our measurements, the Spire Verticool heatsink outputs approximately 44.5dBA, which puts it towards the quieter end of this reference list.

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