Wesley's Tool-Box

• The Contender - Zalman CNPS3100-Gold

 CNPS3100-Gold is a socket HSF from South Korea's Zalman Tech Co., Ltd.. This company is relatively unknown to the computing world because it is an upstart; it was founded in 1999 and started marketing their products for only around 10 months, generally limited to Korean markets. Their flagship product is the patented Flower HeatSink(FHS) as shown above. By forming the heatsink in the likes of a 'flower', it is meant to achieve effective cooling without a fast and noisy fan. This is the basis of their product concept, actually. CNPS in the name of the product stands for 'Computer Noise Prevention System'. This heatsink is the part of Zalman's line of products targeted for low-noise computer systems. Other products they market include FHS for video cards, NP(Noise Prevention) PSUs, and NP Hard Disks. They claim that noise-less computer systems can be built once the person uses all of the products Zalman provides in his/her system. Zalman does sell fully configured systems, also.

 CNPS3100 is the latest in the product lines of the Zalman HSFs, just released in the December of 2000. You can read its news release here in Korean (English product page is here). Zalman has yet to revamp its site to provide multilingual support, so the English page is my translation of the Korean counterpart. FHS was initially made in aluminium with a few fins, but over time, to increase its cooling performance, the recent models are made in pure copper. Pure copper rusts over time, so the latest FHS included in CNPS3100 is coated in either pure gold or chrome to prevent rust. The model tested here is the more expensive(and good-looking) version, the CNPS3100-Gold. The Gold version costs about US$10 more than the Chrome coated version. The shape of the heatsink, the FHS, should no doubt be an eye-catcher for most of you.

 It is without doubt that the shape of the FHS has intrigued a lot of people. Since it is supposed to operate with slow/silent fan or no fan at all while most heatsinks must have fast fans attached, either the company selling it is out of mind or the heatsink must possess cooling performance that is worth (literally) gold. Let's take a look at its key specs:

Specification
Dimensions(mm):	110 x 52 x 65
Mass (grams):	296
Cooling Fan:	Adda 80mm
Fan Speed(rpm):	3000 ~ 1500(Silent)
Fan Power(cfm):	38.6 ~ 20.2(Silent)
Thermal Resistance:	0.28 ~ 0.35(Silent) C/W

 The specifications are already impressive. On their rated thermal resistance, it already beats Alpha PAL6035 in any mode. You will have to see the benchmarks to see if this claim can be backed up, but it would actually be a shame if this massive heatsink weighing in at 70% heavier wouldn't perform at least as good as the competitor. Now the thing that many of you are wondering would be in the form of, "where's the 80mm fan that's listed here? How are you going to install that on the contraption?" Read along and that will be answered.

• CNPS3100's Packaging

 The image on the left is the original package that CNPS3100-Gold comes in. In case you're wondering what those words at the left-top corner are supposed to say, it means, "Powerful... Silent..." Open the box and you see the contents, as shown on the right. You get the instruction booklet(all in Korean just yet), the heatsink itself, and the clip to attach it on(see left of the heatsink). Like PAL6035, it also comes with thermal paste. It comes in an easy-to-use syringe rather than tube, however. At the bottom of the box, you see the fan that was not seen in the initial photo attached to a metal holder with two sets of screws for attaching the holder onto the system case. Just how is all this going to fit into a system? Watch.

• CNPS3100 Installation

 Installing the FHS part of the CNPS3100-Gold is not unlike installing a normal heatsink. Put the clip into the FHS(it slides into place) and push the right edge of the clip to snap on. You can use a flathead or philips screwdriver to help installing/uninstalling it, for there are holes on the clip to accomodate such things. Now comes the peculiar part you'll never see while installing conventional heatsinks. Cooling fan comes attached on a metal holder, which is in turn installed onto the case. This is obviously because the FHS does not have a place to attach fans on(actually, fans can be installed directly onto FHS with a small adaptor screwed in place, but Zalman has no plans to market the adaptor yet). You attach the holder by unscrewing top three screws holding the expansion cards, putting the holder in, and screwing them back.

 You may notice two things of concern here. For one, the fans don't seem to be aligned with the heatsink well. This is not to worry, as the cooling performance is not affected by the location of the fan once it is almost as close to the FHS as shown in the picture. This is mentioned in the instruction booklet and I have moved around the fans closer/farther and confirmed this. In fact, the cooling fan is intended to double as the northbridge chipset fan, so the installation shown in the picture is rather optimal. You can see the northbridge covered in a small green heatsink below the FHS in the left picture. This chip gets very hot during operation and since most mainboards do not actively cool this important chip, CNPS3100's fan setup is well thought up.

 Another concern is that the metal holder leaves no room for installing case fans. This is not so much of a trouble because you can simply attach the case fan on the opposite side to provide same case cooling.

 The two heatsinks looks fine now, but how do they really perform?

• The Champion - Alpha PAL6035

 PAL6035 is a socket HSF from Japan's Alpha Company Ltd.. Alpha has been producing high quality heatsinks with their 'microforging' technology(hence the URL) that enables them to make create heatsinks of efficient shapes since 1989. PAL6035 is one of the top performing heatsinks they offer, second only to PEP66. Here are some key specs of PAL6035:

Specification
Dimensions(mm):	60 x 60 x 35
Mass (grams):	175
Cooling Fan:	Sanyo Denki 60mm
Fan Speed(rpm):	3800
Fan Power(cfm):	20.0
Thermal Resistance:	0.37 C/W

 The specifications reveal that the heatsink is quite a competent model, and it has consistently proven to be well-performing throughout various tests performed by hardware sites such as HardOCP or Tom's Hardware. So we can say it is a good 'reference' high-performance HSF.

• PAL6035's Packaging

 Alpha PAL6035 comes completely unassembled, in part because you assemble the heatsink as you install it on the CPU. In the picture, you see the black-anodized heatsink with Alpha's unique copper-plated bottom. You also see the heatsink cover for effective airflow, as well as the 20cfm Sanyo Denki 60mm fan. This fan is standard part of the PAL6035MUC package that Alpha sells directly. If you get PAL6035 from other places, it may be replaced with different fans. The clip shown here is the old kind, and Alpha has updated the clip for better compatibility with AMD's SocketA CPUs. However, with a bit of bending, the old clip works with SocketA fine. To wrap up the packaging, there is a set of screws for attaching the fan onto the heatsink and Alpha brand thermal grease in a tube.

• PAL6035 Installation

 Installing Alpha is something of moderate difficulty, but not confusing. First you put the clip into the heatsink, then attach it onto the processor. Depending on how dexterous the person is, you can push the clip down with a finger and snap it into place, or a small flathead driver may be necessary to aide/guide the clip in. That's the hard part. Then you put on the cover and screw on the fan to finish installation to get it look like the picture above. Unlike the picture, you have to plug the fan connector in to get it work, of course.

 Now let's take a look at the contender.

• CPUs are Getting Hotter

 Heat in computers have always posed problems to a certain degree. Preliminary electronic computers using vacuum tubes such as ENIAC could not run for more than 30 minutes easily due to burnouts of overheating tubes. Mainframe computers usually operated in air-conditioned rooms. Some modern super-computers operate suspended in a case filled with inert liquid coolant.

 However, personal computers traditionally had few heat-related problems because the components never ran fast or hot compared to the state-of-the-art technologies that existed at the time. Few, if any, systems with heatsinks on a 286 or 386 chips appeared, for the chips were only warm to the touch during normal operation.

 This trend started to change at around the propagation of 486 chips. They were already becoming too hot to touch, and faster versions of 486 started to have heatsink attached on the ceramic package. The Pentium Overdrive processor, shown on the left and plugged into a 486 system, shows such examples of early heatsink coupled CPUs. First Pentium CPUs, the 60MHz and 66MHz versions, were notorious for excessive heat dissipation and was one of the first personal computer CPUs requiring active cooling by motorized fan. Since then, HeatSink-Fan combo(HSF) became standard attachment to CPU.

 The problem did not end there, though. Personal computer CPU development was accelerating day by day and introduction of ever-so-powerful CPUs were frequent. Processing power-wise, top-of-the-line CPUs today are comparable to top 100 supercomputers of only 4 to 5 years ago. In consequence, CPU's heat dissipation rate gradually increased. Smaller manufacturing process does help CPU produce less heat, but this does not help much in reducing the heat dissipation of the most powerful processor on the market. This is because the operating frequency is increasing at a faster rate. One of the hottest(literally and figuratively) chip of today, AMD's 'Thunderbird' Athlon can run without any discernible heat if you run it at 66MHz like the aforementioned early Pentiums. But you don't run Athlon at 66MHz in reality; you run it at up to 1.2GHz, almost 20 times of the Pentium speed.

 Where does all this lead to? Need for better and better HSFs. Some overclockers go so far as to install thermoelectric modules(a.k.a. Peltiers) or water cooling on the CPU, and a few extremists even attempts to dip the system in liquid nitrogen to obtain ultimate cooling. This cannot be the solution for everyone, though, because installation of such things without good background knowledge and caution can ruin the whole system. Companies like VapoChill offers powerful cooling solution by effectively bringing in a small refrigerator into the computer case. This method may be safer, but this is out of reach for many, because the cost is too high.

 And so, in today's article, I have compared two heatsinks deemed to be among the most powerful HSF solutions out there.

• 3D Benches

Benchmark		Celeron	Cyrix III
		466MHz	533MHz	600MHz
3DMark 2000	Overall (1024x768 16bit)	1234	972	1029
	CPU Speed	69	50	53
Quake3 Arena v1.11 (fps)	640x480 HQ	35.0	24.0	25.9
	800x600 HQ	23.6	21.6	22.9
	1024x768 HQ	15.0	15.0	16.2

Let's now look at 3D performance. Duron benchmarks are not available because they were not tested with the same video card. As expected, Celeron easily beats Cyrix III again, despite the fact that Celeron being benchmarked was clocked 12% lower. Take a look at Quake 3 Arena's 640x480 results, which are heavily influenced by CPU performance because it is relatively low-bandwidth, and video card chipset's speed or other subsystem is not much of a bottleneck. That's right - since Q3A's not heavily 3DNow! optimized, Cyrix III's weak FPU performance shows through. In case of 1024x768, though, because of the FSB being twice as wide as Celeron, the score gets slightly better, covering the deficiency in raw power.

This just goes on to show that Cyrix III is certainly NOT meant for gaming. If you're planning to build a cheap, but capable gaming system, there's no better choice than Duron, which is only about $30 more expensive and should offer better performance than even Celeron shown here.

• Conclusions and Other Comments

 

The screen above was taken at the boot time when testing Cyrix III 600MHz. You can see Cyrix III's name on the screen here, but I couldn't get this nor get the system to boot at all. Why? Because BIOS was a bit old and couldn't recognize the chip. Thankfully, I was able to get a more recent BIOS supporting Cyrix III and was able to continue the testing. Just a reminder for those of you planning to get a Cyrix III - get the BIOS updated first.

Alrighty.. This review was meant to be a short 2-page review... sigh. But it is not, as you can see... It's a good thing I'm finally on the last page. Now for the conclusion. For people in the business who'd like to get their systems as cheap as possible should get this chip. As an added bonus(?), the employees would be discouraged from playing games at work while not affecting productivity of the usual business applications. For the average users and people who are already enthusiastic of the computer hardware so much that he/she was actually able to visit/read this page should avoid this chip like plague.

Having said that, you'd probably wonder why I would devote twice the amount of pages to show you such a terrible CPU at work. This is because I was so frustrated in reviewing the chip that I wanted to show you everything I thought about it. Pull out the benchmarks and this could've been a rant. Yawn.. I need sleep again. Oh, yeah, don't forget to type away your opinions on the discussion board!

• System Configuration

CPU:	Celeron & Cyrix III
M/B:	MSI MS-6309 (VIA 694x chipset) - VIA 4-in-1 v4.24a -
Cooling:	Standard Intel Heatsink/Fan
RAM:	64MB x 2 Samsung PC-100 CAS3 SDRAM
Video:	MSI MS-8808 (NVIDIA Riva TNT2 m64) - NVIDIA Det. v6.26 -
OS:	Windows 98 - Version 4.10.1998, Korean -
Else:	DirectX 8 beta2 build 146 installed

• Synthetic Benches

Benchmark		Celeron	Cyrix III		Duron
		466MHz	533MHz	600MHz	650MHz
d.net client	RC5 Long, opt.core (MKeys/s)	1.312	0.650	0.731	2.230
Sandra 2000 7.6.49	Dhrystone (MIPS)	1262	600	667	1855
	Whetstone (MFLOPS)	627	174	199	876
	Multimedia ALU (it/s)	1438 (MMX)	578 (MMX)	650 (MMX)	2150 (MMX)
	Multimedia FPU (it/s)	670 (FPU)	889 (3DNow!)	1001 (3DNow!)	2751 (3DNow!)
	Memory ALU (MB/s)	122	112	115	423
	Memory FPU (MB/s)	135	166	164	531

Duron benchmarks come from earlier article for reference. What do we have here? Cyrix III's performance is not only easily beaten by a Celeron of lower MHz, but it gets run over flat by other 'value' chip, AMD Duron. A Celeron 466 is posting up to twice the speed of a Cyrix III 600. This is certainly not good. If you look at the Whetstone(FPU) benchmark, Cyrix III's FPU is simply jaw-dropping(the other way around). It is somehow overcome with the implementing 3DNow!, as Multimedia FPU benchmark shows much better score. However, this means that unless an FPU-intensive program such as a game supports 3DNow! well, expect incredible slowdowns.

These results were not very far from the expectations, but as you can see, VIA's decisions on choosing MHz over performance is having some serious whiplash. It's just sad that many customers may fall victim to the 'MHz sells' scheme. The impact is vastly more serious when comparing Cyrix III with AMD's Duron. Once upon a time (about 2 years ago) AMD and Cyrix's offerings had relatively similar performance in general. Now, Duron outperforms Cyrix by about three times on average! Despite the fact that both chips are competing in the same market segment, comparing Durons to Cyrix III looks almost wrong.

What if you take the actual selling price to account? Cyrix III is expected to be selling at around $60 for 600MHz version. Since Celeron sells for about $90~100 for the same MHz, price-performance ratio is similar or slightly bad for Cyrix III. This fact is rather fortunate for Cyrix III, because in the area where raw CPU performance doesn't matter much, such as in general business environment, this looks attractive - you get the performance that you only paid for. The local distributor is not dumb, and this is exactly where they'll focus on the sales of the chip.