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Swiftech MC462A Heatsink


Date
: 06/4/01 – 11:07:39 PM

Author
:

Category
: Cooling

Manufacturer: Swiftech
Price: $79.95

Introduction

Back in the days when the Alpha coolers became popular, people who saw one for the first time were speechless because of the size of these things. Two years later, everyone is used to the Alpha’s and noone is amazed anymore when they see one. However, there is a new heatsink in town that will get jaws dropping to the floor and impressing people at LAN parties all around the world! As you might remember from our latest cooler shootout, Swiftech’s MC370-0A was one of the top performers. Today we take a look at the 370-0A’s bigger brother: the MC-462A rev. 1 … and let me tell you, unlike what some say,
size
does matter! And size is not the only thing that makes this mofo look bad …

The Specifications

The MC462A has a pretty impressive spec list making you wonder if this is actually made to ‘just’ cool a cpu ;).

Heatsink

- CNC machined
- C110 copper base
- 3′ (7.5cm) width x 3′ (7.5cm) long x 1.56′ (3.9cm) high (without the fan mounted)
- Perfectly flat base (0.001′ perfect)
- 269 pins made of high thermal conductivity alloy (230W/m-K)
- Weighs 27oz (560g) without fan and 27oz (760g) with fan
- Comes with all mounting hardware and thermal paste
- Comes with manual
- Works with every processor available (optional mounting hardware is needed for the Intel P4)

Fan

- 80mm Sanyo Deki fan
- Molex connector for power
- Comes with a 3-pin connector intended to measure fan rpm
- 53CFM
- 4600rpm
- 45dbA

Pretty impressive huh? Let me reassure you that seeing/holding the unit is even more impressive and it makes your previous heatsink look totally underpowered!

The base is made entirely out of C110 copper which reassures that heat is sucked away as fast as possible from the heat source (aka the core of the processor). Also note that the base is perfectly flat and polished so well that I can see myself in it just like in a mirror.

(And damn, I look good :)) After the heat is trapped into the copper base, it has to go somewhere else because otherwise the core would overheat pretty fast … so this is where the 269 (!!) aluminium pins come into play. Most heatsinks use flat fins to drag heat away from the base, but Swiftech does not. Instead they use rounded and shiny pins and as you will see in the tests later on, they do the job very well. The entire heatsink weighs around 560gr, which probably makes it the heaviest heatsink known to mankind these days. As you
might have guessed, the plastic feet on the motherboard socket are not suited to handle a load like this, so Swiftech uses the four holes around the socket to mount their unit. I’ll discuss the mounting later on in the review.

Of course a good heatsink will suck big time if it is used with a crappy fan. Luckily Swiftech is aware of this and they used a topnotch fan on the 462A: a Sanyo Deki 80mm fan that runs at 4600rpm delivering a 53CFM airflow! For those of you who do not know Sanyo Deki, Alpha also uses them on their heatsinks, but most retailers ship the units with Y.S Tech and Sunon fans.

With 53CFM of cooling power, noone is going to complain about its performance, but what about noise? You’re right there … this fan emits around 45dbA of soundwaves. Some will find this loud, others will laugh at this since they are used to their six 130CFM 120mm fans ;). Personally I think the noise is not annoying at all … to be honest the noise of a 60mm delta fan is much worse (to me anyway). The fact that this one doesn’t produce that high pitch tone that the delta’s emit, but instead a more low ‘roaring’ might got something to do with it.

Connecting a fan like this one that draws a huge amount of volts from your motherboard would easily torch the power connector on your mainboard. That’s why Swiftech installed a molex (like you use to power hard drives and cd-roms) to supply the needed amount of power. Does this mean that you can not measure the fan’s rpm readings? Not at all!! The fan ALSO has a 3-pin connector to connect to (you guessed it) your motherboard. Now you can read the rpm’s in your favorite monitoring tool (something like Motherboard Monitor). Sweet!

Installing The MC462A Onto Your Rig

Like I said earlier, the MC462A is not installed the ‘normal’ way. With normal I am refering to the normal clip/plastic feet on the socket of the mobo setup. That setup is not made to support a heatsink of 560g without fan and 760g with the fan installed! And since we do not want our heatsink falling of the cpu and killing both the cpu and the videocard it will land on (crash?), Swiftech’s engineers used another mounting solution.

Most of you have already noticed that almost all motherboards currently available have 4 holes aroudn the cpu socket, but not much was known about the use of them. Swiftech has used them to secure the MC462A onto your cpu and motherboard without any risk of the heatsink falling of or even damaging the cpu! To prove it, they threw a test system with the heatsink installed on a mobo and cpu for 30 feet down! Result? Nothing but the case itself was damaged!! Amazing no? So how do we install it exactly? Let me show you with some pics:

First you have to install four standoff spacers to the motherboard in which you will secure the heatsink in a few minutes. In order to do so, you will have to remove your motherboard from its case or cut a hole in the motherboard tray of your case (I have chosen the first option because I didn’t felt like cutting up my brand new Lian Li PC70 tower).

If the holes on your board are big enough, than you have to install the supplied shoulder washers (they make sure you won’t ground your motherboard and kill some stuff) first. Then you put the standoff washers through these shoulder washers and securely mount them by putting on the nylon nuts at the back of the motherboard. Do not use tools to fasten them as chances are very big you will slip and break some important resistor of the back of your motherboard, resulting in a dead motherboard (and we don’t want that to happen do we?). If you plan on removing the cooler often, apply a drop of glue on the back of the mobo. That way the nuts won’t fall of when you losen the screws (otherwise you can remove your motherboard everytime you want to change cpu). I did not apply glue for the simple reason that I switch cpu’s and motherboards every week so the glue would be more of a pain than a blessing to me.

Next thing to do is prepare the heatsink itself for installement. Put a plastic washer over the screw, put the spring over it and then add another washed. Do this 4 times and install the screws in the predrilled holes in the MC462A. Done!

Now it’s time to install the cpu. Insert the cpu into the socket, apply some thermal paste (there is paste included in the heatsink package) and for safety reasons, I decided to use a non-conductive shim as well (thank to Overclockers Hideout for supplying those). Now just align the screws that stick out the bottom of the MC462A with the standoff washers and slowly bolt the unit down. Again don’t apply too much pressure! The springs to all the work for you so you just have to make sure that the unit won’t drop of :p.

Last but not least you have to install the fan into place. This is the most easy part of the entire install procedure. Put the screws in the designated holes on the fan, align the screws with the holes in the heatsink and fasten them. That wasn’t too hard was it?

Now that we have installed our test sample, lets see how it performs!

Let The Torturing Begin!

First lets look at the test setup like we always do:

- AMD 1.0GHz @ 1.33GHz
- MSI K7T Turbo
- 384MB PC133 CAS2 Crucial memory
- VisionTek GeForce3
- IBM 30GB 7200rpm hard drive
- Accton 100Mbit NIC
- Teac 32x cd-rom
- Windows 2000 + SP2 + VIA 4.31 + Detonator 12.40

The processor we used is an AXIA stepping 1GHz model that was overclocked to 1.33GHz (thanks to OCZ for supplying it) with a core voltage of 1.85v. Situations like this is what the MC462A is intended for peeps, as this heatsink is the supposed to be the king of overclocking (besides watercooling but that’s for the more experienced users). Of course noone is stopping you from installing the heatsink on your Duron 800 but to be honest that would be MAJOR overkill …

The cpu was dispating around 78W of heat which is quite a bit, but as the charts below will show the Swiftech unit has no problems with it!

Like I said this beast knows how to handle a high clocked heatsource like the AMD TBird!!

Conclusion

What can I add to the review that I did not talk about yet? I said all that needed to be said so I can only stress on the fact that apart from killer looks, the MC462A delivers topnotch performance and can handle just about everything you throw at it! Quality was definately the highest priority when the engineers developped the MC462A because only high end components were used. The fan is very good, but for some it might be too loud. No worries, Swiftech has an optional baybus for it that lets you set the fan speed between 3600 and

4600rpm so you can set it to your needs and noise levels. Apart from the fan grill that is missing, this unit has everything you could ask for! (You can not install a fan grill with the supplied bolts as they are too shorts … so you’ll have to get new bolts if you want a grill).

Good

- Performance
- Complete with everything you need
- High quality
- Good manual

Bad

- A bit pricey (although you do get very good quality and quality has its price)
- No grill (might be dangerous for some of you ;p)