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Globalwin VOS32 SECC2 Cooler


Date
: 09/19/00 – 03:14:29 AM

Author
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Category
: Cooling

I’m pretty bad at introducing articles. Concluding them too. For some reason, I can write the body pretty well, but that’s besides the point. This is a ‘review’ of a Globalwin VOS32 SECC2 Cooler. So let’s just move on to the meat, which is what you came here for anyway.

When I first got my P3 550E in March, I told myself, once I get a little more money together, I’m getting a big-ass cooler. I continued to say this to myself even while wrecking a couple hundred dollars of my own computer hardware throughout the summer. It was a good thing I had a fairly well paying summer internship, because a couple weeks ago I finally broke down and bought the Globalwin VOS32 I had been lusting after for months. 733mhz was a breeze with the ‘Intel Stock’ cooler, I could even run at 825mhz with fair stability, though I think I could have fried eggs off of the heatsink on a warm day. Where is this article going you ask? I’m trying to build up to the fact that my hot CPU needed to run a little cooler than it had been and so I got this huge cooler to do the job.

Measurements
. If any of you have seen pictures of this badboy, or even seen it in person, you know it’s a beast. I couldn’t get any pictures of it while setting up, but let me assure you, it dwarfs the Stock heatsink. If you have 3 stock heatsinks, stack them on top of eachother, and you’ll probably have an idea of the height at least of the unit, not to mention the width. Go here for the specs.

Pictures

Installation
Now that we’ve seen all sides of the VOS32, you get to read about my adventures installing it. The package came with the heatsink, the fans, all of the metal screws and stuff, as well as a pretty comprehensive manual. I had pretty much no trouble reading and understanding the thing, which is pretty good since I can mess up opening a bag of chips. The thing you don’t see in these pics above is the flimsy little clip GW is using to hold this mammoth hunk of metal onto the CPU. They must realize that this cooler ‘weighs a metric ton’( if you know where this quote is from), and so I would think a little tighter clippage would be nessescary. Anyway, I thought wrong. Using my ingenious MacGuyver-esc skills, I slid a bunch of pennies I had lying around into the loose places where there was too much give on the back of the CPU. Here is a pic that I’m linking to on HardOCP that shows the actual clip on the thing. I wedged the pennies into the back there so the heatsink would have no give to lose contact.

I’ll get into contact area of the CPU in a second. I just wanted to state that only the intrepid souls that try out the CPU should attempt to run their RAM in bank 0. Unless your RAM slots are far enough away that it doesn’t matter, on my ASUS P3V4X, the first slot was a very close fit, and would have been useless had the fans been any larger. As it is, using the CPU holder thingy that comes with every Slot 1 motherboard and is so hard to get on, the heatsink was very stabily on there and wasn’t all loose and stuff. By the way, I’m using Thermalloy Silicon Paste which has been suiting me well for a while now. Pretty good stuff.

Contact Problems
I had a pretty big problem at first with the heatsink not contacting the CPU well and therefore not conducting heat well. Thats where the pennies came in. I stuck the pennies in all over the place so that there would be absolutely no give whatsoever. So little give in fact that no matter how much I stared at the heatsink, willing it to bend foward a little, it wouldn’t budge. Without the pennies, I would get pretty bad contact and right when I booted up(at 825mhz 1.7v) the CPU would be running at 70C+ via the ondie CPU temp probe. Putting pressure on the heatsink while in the BIOS would result in temps up to 20C lower. Once I had enough pennies on there, the temp stabilized and I no longer needed to add pressure to the heatsink.

Results
Since the only results you can get from a heatsink review are temperatures, this is what I’ll give. These temps were taken after relentless CPU stressing, running prime95 torture test as well as a bunch of other less stressing programs. They were taken at 825mhz 1.7v, which seems to be stable even with my Stock heatsink on this P3V4X. This wasn’t so with any other BX boards I’ve had(so probably memory related), but that’s a story for a different day.

HS/F	Temp in C
Intel Stock	59C/138F
GW VOS 32	46C/114F

I’d like to point out that I’ve got a temp probe on the CPU slug right next to the core, and it’s reporting temps of around 30C at high stressing. I’m under the impression that either the ondie temp probe is wrong, or the temp is being reported too high. Anyway, although the temps are pretty high, I’m betting the relativity of the benchmarks are valid. What I mean here is that although the temps are too high, they are consistently too high. So let’s look at this. 13 degrees Celsius is actually a pretty big deal. This is around a 24 degree difference in Farenheit! I’ll take it.

A few suggestions and Conclusion
If you’re going to install this heatsink without a copper shim or any kind of stabilizer, I’d say good luck. The heatsink is so big and heavy, and the CPU core itself is tiny, that you’ll really have trouble getter good contact with just the plain clip that comes with it. Wedging coins or flat objects into the back clip is definitely one way of stabilizing the heatsink. Another way is a copper shim, which seems to help many people. As far as getting more overclocking out of my 550E, thats a m00t point, as I have the later version of the P3V4X(the winbond version), which only supports FSB’s up to 150mhz. The CPU is totally stable at this speed however, and runs prime95 torture tests for many hours(I usually shut it off before it gives and error).

For around $29.99 around the net, this CPU is definitely a great value. For people that have trouble coming up with gas money and those that live on a salary a hobo would laugh at, you may want to take a look at the Slot 1 Golden Orb(Gorb) CPU Cooler which you can usually find for ~$15 and which also provides a great price/performance ratio with it’s small sleek size. On the other side of the tracks, is the Alpha series(P3125) which you can usually find for $49.99 or so. This is the Cadillac of heatsinks, and you WILL get your money’s worth with it. I won’t go too much into detail, but if it was $20 less, I would have gone for it. The $29 Globalwin VOS32 gives you the middle road with everything, and is probably just a hair behind the Alpha in heat dissipation. I’d say go for the VOS32.