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The two piece installation was laughably simple. Honestly, it felt like installing yet another stock heatsink with a few extra cables and a pci adaptor. The three lug clip was welcome, but not exactly the best motherboard mounting method, although Thermaltake has still yet to design a heatsink which utilizes the more secure method of hole-mounting(hint, hint!). For heavy copper heatsinks, the hole method is necessary but for lighter heatsinks such as the 4G, the lugs should be fine. This clip was far too tight as provided although the friendly neighbourhood vice helped straighten things out. I have never managed crushed a core before, but I know a coolermaster heatsink with a stiff clip who's eaten several gigahertz.... and in light of said problems every heatsink manufacturer should steer clear of socket lug clips! That was the worst idea in the history of CPU cooling! (maybe AMD should be blamed instead....although they did appease with the motherboard mounting holes which seem even more secure than Intel's....but that's a completely separate argument waiting to happen).
After plugging in the 120V power cable and six conductor
heatsink cable into the PCI card, powering up the
system challenged my logic which cost me an entire
two paragraphs of text. Upon viewing the BIOS screen
and spotting an average temperature of 35C it seemed
nothing was special about this heatsink. Reboot, windows,
hardware monitor. After fifteen minutes, readings
indicated 47.5 Celsius on the core and 20 celsius
on the motherboard (typical mobo temp in this tower).
Have I forgotten thermal grease? No, I used CoolingFlow
and it's better than AS3 (sorry folks but it's been
tested).
Is the socket lug on properly? Looking closely at
the lug, I noticed the thin aluminum band has actually
twisted to attach only ONE of the three pins onto
the lugs on the lower side! Luckily the heatsink did
not fall off but for lack of better expression in
said circumstances, this clip sucks! Another reboot
and an overclock brought back much higher temps, 2GHz
was 53.5C and 2.16GHz wouldn't even hit windows without
increasing Vcore to 1.75. Even then, I couldn't stand
watching the temperature climb past 60C and I shut
down.
The problem was, the power plug in the PCI card wasn't
shoved in hard enough. Shoved in represents the force
required to actually make contact, and after doing
so performance increases dramatically! Chances are
I got a picky plug but it stayed in fine and took
quite the yank to remove. After powering up, the numbers
dropped. Stock showed me the lowest numbers I've ever
seen on a loaded CPU, 33.5C on the core, and 21C on
the motherboard with that added thermal load. Increasing
the core to 2GHz almost made a linear jump in to 38.5C(motherboard
23C) , surprisingly, as temperatures don't often increase
that quickly under such a small core power output
difference. This indicates the SubZero4G cannot handle
a heavy load and sustain itself at low temperatures
when overclocked. After overclocking to 2.2GHz and
increasing the core voltage to 1.7 the temperature
rose to 47C and stopped. The mainboard temperature
came to a halt at 24C, higher than ever before at
a 20C room temperature. At all speeds the stability
was never compromised, in fact the PC was more stable
during these tests than usual. No artifacts in 3d
graphics, no crashes, no complaints. I might as well
have been using a P4!
Judging by the ease of installation and risk-free usage, this product cannot be compared to any watercooling or phase change cooling unit. In that respect it is simply an outstanding heatsink with minimal installation time, no maintenance, no leaks, no problems, no operational costs, no condensation, decent cooling (as far as anyone should be concerned) and noise-free operation. During the entire trial period I did not ONCE hear the fan. After removing the side door, turning the 4G to power mode and even turning down the fan speeds of the 120mm intake fans at the front, while placing my head near the 4G I couldn't pick up a sound. Above 40mm dimensions, this has got to be the most silent fan I've ever used. Thermaltake achieved exactly what they set out to do, and as quoted from their website, The SubZero4G certainly "reduces fan noise without compromising cooling".
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