The Ascent didn't manage to perform very well overall. While it only came in a few degrees poorer than the Thermalbuster, it just died on the small copper die template test. The superorb, which is much heavier, and for the sake of fairness, much better designed easily kicked its' butt! The Thermal buster appears to have performed about as poorly, except for the fact that the ascent managed to rack in a temperature of 70+. That means it went up, way up past what our thermistors could read. Contrastingly, the ThermalBuster at least held steady ground at 68 degrees.

The results look a little bit different when we look at the Acent's performance in terms of rise of ambient temperature. While the SuperOrb smashed each of the other heatsinks out of the competition, the smaller and much less expensive Ascent actually performed a bit better then the very capable Thermalbuster could with the large copper die template, and then once again totally died when strapped onto the smaller copper die template.

Conclusion:

For overclocked Celeron's this heatsink would perform adequately, but considering the price it goes for what do you really expect? At about $12 a pop these heatsinks are by far the least expensive coolers we've tested. The folded-fin design looks promising, but seems to have reached the limitations of what it can handle. Without a doubt these coolers were designed for K6-2 and PGA Celeron chips. Using this heatsink with an overclocked chip won't really put you ahead of the game but it should at least stop your chip from melting down into a pile of dust.

If you have an option, move onto another more traditionally designed extruded cooler. Chances are it will offer you better cooling on both FC-PGA and PGA processor platforms. The Ascent is absolutely not designed for the smaller silicon cores of Durons, CopperMines, or T-birds. For K6-2 or PGA Celeron's it will offer cooling performance on the most basic level, and really shouldn't be used with any kind of overclocked rig.