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Loading ...Akasa Vortexx Neo - SOLD - (+ benchmarks)
khenry
Having given up on Ebay, why not flog stuff at a place where the item’s received a trusted review and practical testing? If you’re considering the cooler as reviewed in issue 59 and which I blogged about at the start of the month, I’ve got a brand new and sealed spare one courtesy of Overclockers whom I’ll never shop with again.
If you don’t have issue 59 then the review should hit the site within the next 10 days and I’ll link to it here. The card tested with the cooler was the 8800GT and other people’s user experiences at home with Nvidia cards can be seen in these two threads on the forum, here.
So if you’re interested then post a comment or email kenneth_henry AT yahoo dot com.
I also said I’d report some general temps on my Radeon 3850 with the new cooler fitted (all in centigrade unless othewise stated):
Call of Duty 4 was one of the games sending the card up to 90 degrees and crashing the machine out.
I was able to push CoD4 to 1,280 x 1,024 at 100Hz with 4xAA and everything else set to maximum, (my preferred max res on a 17in CRT) and play at 33fps average, 45 maximum (with troughs of 21-25 on the busiest maps). The temp spread was 43 degrees from the startup screen to 51 degrees in the game by the time I stopped playing the general spread of Domination Maps. When I can remember names I’ll edit this and note the peaks and troughs.
Crysis, at the village with 20 soldiers before you have to rescue the hostage in an upstairs room and destroy three tanks, was another game crashing at 90 degrees. After fitting the Vortexx Neo, not only was this busy action scene playable (which included a petrol station explosion if you drove carelessly) but the best balance for this demanding game was 1,024 x 768 with 4 x AA with the game itself selecting medium for all settings. I could then play at an average of 30fps exactly when surrounded by general jungle or landscape, only dropping to a low of 20-22fps when zooming in on the assault scope attachment of any weapon. The temperature range was 46-50 degrees.
I could have played at my desktop res of 1152 x 864, but would have had to stay at 2xAA to achieve more than 20fps on the framerate. The cooler kept the card below 50 degrees, but playable and sustainable anti-aliasing on the runt of the Radeon range was the best I could achieve before the next upgrade is due. At least it’s ready for Warhead, even if Crytek doesn’t render the engine down to prove more system-friendly.
I still wasn’t happy so torture tested the 3850 by setting everything to High, but staying at 10 x 7 and 2xAA. FRAPs reported a 47fps peak, 25fps average but the temperature stayed in the high 40s to 52 degrees. The same torture test at 1152 x 864 finally crashed the card.
Until Valve introduces its proposed engine upgrade to Source for newer dual and quad-core CPUs/GPUs, there’s almost no point in bothering with speed testing; it didn’t fall below 40fps and peaked at 50 in any of the Source games tested including mods, and managed this at 1152 x 864 with 4x AA, everything set to high or high from default selections in the menus. Like CoD 4 though, at the higher resolutions, reading text in MP gaming was almost impossible so you really needed to play with a headset enabled. The temperature was 43-45 degrees and on the day I was testing it was 23 degrees outside, but on cooler days I could play Source games and the temperature was so close to that of the Windows desktop (35-37 degrees) as to be negligible - the 2-3 degree spread would sometimes disappear when I was ALT-TABbing back to Hardware Monitor to pick up the temps.
So this cooler does what it says on the tin, it’s well worth buying and upgrading the default cooler on the current spread of two generations. Since the Radeon 4850 also sports a similar if slightly wider reference cooler, it remains to be seen whether the Neo Vortexx will fit that card as well. On the day that I fitted mine to my 3850, my frustration at the reference cooler subsided and it’s true that I could have merely re-applied some TIM, reseated the reference cooler and started again. However it was another learning experience.
As far as I know that’s the best price you’ll find because I’m including delivery and technically comes with 11 or so months of warranty if I bung in the paperwork, but if you’re buying brand new then stick to Scan like I should have done.
UPDATE 21/7/08 : Thankfully the power of CPC Blogs has struck again! The spare cooler was sold at an unbeatable £18 all in so a bargain for the buyer - basically free delivery compared to the street price on the Elite list and I was just glad to have got shot of my unnecessary spare. So if it’s not against Dennis online policy and you’re sick of trying to sell stuff on Ebay, then give your blog headline space a go.
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