Seidon 120V vs Intel stock cooler test

I currently run 6 * i7s in my little render farm, and when upgrading one machine to 4770K recently I decided to try a single rad Coolermaster Seidon 120V instead of the stock Intel cooler just as an experiment. Since I already had another 4770K (same mobo, ram etc) in my setup I was able to do a side by side test of water vs stock Intel cooler.

This screenshot was taken using remote desktop + Aida64, and shows the 2 machines rendering different frames of the same Cinema 4D project. The water cooler system is about 15C below the stock cooler.



not bad for about £30

Cooler Master: Seidon 120V

Mellon Head said:

Very nice. That's quite a difference over the stock cooler.

Are you going to buy more of them now? lol

Thanks for reply - my other render machines are mATX cases (2 fans in/out) and the Coolermaster radiator/fan is a bit too big for them. Anyhow, I'm now an H2O convert. The 15C drop could come in handy for o/c people. I'd read bad reports of 4th gen i7s running hot, but mine seem to level out at low 70C's with the stock cooler, which is good considering C4D rendering is quite demanding.

BTW the mobo I use for my 4th gen i7s is kinda interesting. It's an MSI B85M-E45 mATX and can drive 3 HD monitors. Has mobo ports for VGA, DVI-D, HDMI and 4 DDR slots - currently costs around £60. Multi screens without a separate gfx card is good for anyone using Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere Pro etc.

Mellon Head said:

And that is an interesting motherboard. It might be very useful for the home theatre market, too.

I quite like the fact that the MSI mobo has 4 RAM slots. Most mATX boards only have 2, so if you decide to increase your RAM it's replacement not adding - eg I use 2*4GB Corsair Vengeance with those MSI boards. Doubling the RAM would just mean buying another 2 sticks whereas with a 2 slot board I'd be buying 2*8GB which is a big difference in price.

The Haswell multi screen capabilities is a bit wasted on me, because I run my render pcs 'headless' and use remote desktop for admin stuff. However, I could see someone using that board with say a regular DVI monitor and a long lead going from the HDMI port to a big TV - for iPlayer, Netflix, YouTube etc.