Asetek VapoChill XE II (Extreme Edition II) [AC]

Overclocking with the VapoChill XE II:

The test system setup is as follows:

I did try to get the VapoChill to work with a couple AMD S939 Winchester CPUs that I have, however there is an issue with these CPUs and cold temperatures that people have reported problems with. Some people have had zero problems, others have had no luck at all. Luckily there are no reported issues with Socket 754, and also none with the FX chips. Initial tests of the newer S939 "Venice" cores have had no ill effects either.

Overclocking results will vary based on the CPU, Motherboard, Memory, etc. The VapoChill's goal is to provide continuous sub-zero temperatures for the CPU at a reasonable noise level. Running the CPU at colder temps generally allows higher speeds to be achieved, and usually with lower voltages.

Utilizing the VapoChill XE II we were able to achieve a maximum stable speed of 4.4GHz @ 1.45V, that's 1.2GHz (~38% increase) over stock speed! We were able to boot at much higher speeds, but nothing that I would consider "stable". Even when running at 4.4GHz under full load, the CPU temperature was still well below zero.

While performance will vary greatly based on the setup used, for our comparison we ran a few benchmarks at the following speeds:

• 3.20 GHz / 200 FSB - CPU's stock speed
• 3.92 GHz / 245 FSB - Maximum stable speed using Intel retail heatsink
• 4.40 GHz / 275 FSB - Maximum stable speed using VapoChill XE II

To give an idea of the temperatures that the VapoChill provides, here is a chart showing the recorded temperatures. Fan speed was set at 50%, which provides a reasonably quiet setup while still maintaining excellent cooling. All of the power management options (SpeedStep, C1E, etc) were disabled in the BIOS prior to testing.

Asetek has a nice graph on their website illustrating the temperature / load differences between the XE, XE II, and LS models: