Evercool PT03-9232CP

Introduction

Evercool makes cooling products for everything that could be cooled in a computer, from water cooling kits and hard drive coolers to notebook cooling pads. Today, I have a CPU cooler; The Evercool PT03-9232CP. Many companies tend to find a cooler design that works and utilize it with as many products as they can. Evercool went with the circular design, not all that different from the stock Intel cooler. Intel’s cooler is not too impressive, but has Evercool learned from Intel’s mistakes and found a better way to make a great cooler?

Evercool PT03-9232CP

My review sample came in a brown box with some black imaging on it. It’s nice, but won’t stand out on store shelves. The heatsink came very well packed. On Evercool’s website, they have a flashy retail box for this cooler.

The heatsink appears plain-looking. It looks like nothing more than some aluminum painted gray, which doesn’t sound like anything that will cool well. My first reaction to this was: “Are you kidding me? There is no way this is going to cool my CPU.” I jumped on Evercool’s website and quickly learned it’s what is on the inside that counts. This isn’t your normal aluminum; this cooler has cold forge aluminum. Not sure what that will get you? Evercool says that it should provide better thermal performance of about 20%~30% compared to normal aluminum.

The bottom has no copper (that is nearly unheard of for this type of CPU cooler), but remember it has cold forge aluminum.

Specifications and Installation

The Fan and Specifications:

The fan and finger guard remind me of a snowflake. The finger guard works well.

The fan is big. With nearly 52.5 CFM, it should provide nice airflow over the heatsink. The fan power may be the greatest difference improvement over the stock Intel cooler. This fan will go a long way in keeping the CPU cool. The fan is rated at less than 31 dBA, which puts the fan near the quiet zone. It’s not exactly silent but it’s not very loud either.

Installation:

The mounting is a little different on this cooler then many of the aftermarket coolers. Instead of the screw being attached to the cooler and the nut to the back plate, it is the other way around. Neither way seems to have any advantages over the other. Total installation time rivaled most F1 pit crews.

It has no problems fitting on the motherboard, but there isn’t a whole lot of extra room left around the cooler.

Test Setup and Results

Test Setup and Method:

For the testing of the Evercool PT03-9232CP a temperature probe was place next to the heatspreader. The coolers were placed on the CPU with a thin layer of Artic Silver’s Ceramique thermal paste. For the idle reading the computer was left idling in windows, and for stress 2 instances of CPU Burn-in were run.

Test System Specifications:

• Intel Pentium 4 520 2.8 GHz (14 x 200 MHz)
• ASUS P5WD2 955X
• Patriot DDR2 PC2-5600+XBLK
• ATI X800XL
• OCZ PowerStream 520 Watt

Results:

The Evercool PT03-9232CP is quite good at doing its job. At 3.6GHz, this cooler was able to cool the CPU better than the stock cooler at stock speed. While under stress load and overclocked, the temperature did break 50 degrees Celsius, but only by 1/5 of a degree. These results are some of the better ones I have seen.

Conclusion and Thoughts

Looks can be deceiving, and the Evercool PT03-9232CP is very deceiving. From the looks of it, I would not want to even place this heatsink on the older Northwood core Pentium 4. There isn’t any copper, which is usually found in most coolers. Other than the fan, this cooler is rather dull. Luckily, this is where the downside ends. Once you screw this cooler down, it reveals its inner beauty. Actually, it starts as you screw it down; this cooler is really easy to install. The Evercool PT03-9232CP outperforms the Intel cooler, beating it by a sizeable margin in every test. The fan on this cooler is a beast (in a good way). It pushes a lot of air through the cooler, which does wonders for the results. I’m not going to lie, I told John Chen this cooler was going to be a dud. I was wrong. This cooler is a really efficient cooler. I would recommend this to anyone shopping around for a LGA-775 cooler. I looked around to see if I could find out how much this cooler goes for, but I couldn’t find it for sale anywhere.

We would like to thank Evercool for providing us the sample. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to hit us up in the forums. You can also check out more of our latest reviews on the front page.