Cooler Xtreme : Coolers
: Cpu Cooler : Spire 5E34B3
Spire 5E34B3
At a glance, the 5E34B3 looks pretty
much like the 5E32B3, but it's actually quite different. The dinky stock
fan's the same and so's the nice clip, but the heat sink is a bit taller,
and has more fins...
...and there's a copper heat-spreader
base, shown here with its stock thermal gum still in place, protected by
its peel-off wrapper.
The base isn't machine-clamped
in place, or shrink-fitted, or thermal-epoxied; there are instead a couple
of screws that go through the bottom of the aluminium portion of the heat
sink and into the copper. The space in between the copper and the aluminium's
greased up with white thermal compound.
This bodes badly for the 5E34B3's
performance, especially with its un-thrilling stock fan, and it indeed only
just edges out its lower-surface-area all-aluminium cousin; it scored only
0.71°C/W. By way of experiment, I removed the stock fan and gave the cooler
my YS Tech screamer instead; now it did 0.60°C/W, which isn't far off the
performance of the best coolers in this comparison.
But, for a given air flow, there's
no reason to suppose that the copper-based Spire will do very much better
than the all-aluminium version. If the price is right, there's nothing wrong
with this thing, as a quiet cooler with its stock fan.
