Cooling performance

Thermal performance on our overclocked Athlon was pretty impressive. While idle temperatures were even across the board, once the system was put under load, you begin to see how well the Domino cools. On the quiet setting, temperatures never went above 40 degrees Celsius, even with additional voltage on the CPU. The Domino was able to cool the CPU between an average of 11 to 18 degrees cooler than what we saw from the stock heatsink! We will see, however, that full fan mode has its own disadvantages in the level of sound produced.






Here we can see similar results with our much hotter Core i7 965. Once again, there wasn’t much improvement over idle temperatures, but once the system was stressed, you can see just how efficient the Domino is. We see a 15 degree gap between the stock cooler and the Domino. We also noticed how quickly the system responded to temperature changes. Once load was applied, the Domino was quick to react by increasing fan and pump speeds as necessary to keep all temperatures within a tight tolerance. It never had to increase speeds by much, however, as temperatures hovered between 44 and 52 degrees depending on fan speed.







At almost 60dBA, you can clearly see the trade-off one makes when running at full mode. The Domino literally screams at high speed, moving vast amounts of air over the heat exchanger. Full mode is so loud, it borders on the impractical. Having the case closed made little difference, as the fan noise just came straight out the back. Full operation seems only to be useful to showcase just how cold the Domino can get a CPU, instead of being a truly useful mode due to the high level of noise.