Installation.

Installation of the Alpenfohn Brocken is a breeze, even a PC World employee could quite happily assemble the product.

We start off by picking up the back plate of which one side has the label Intel and on the reverse AMD. Simply chose the side, that will face the system board and insert the small black plastic spacer into the middle hole of the backing plate. Please note that the previously mentioned spacer is only employed if one is using a AM2 or socket 775 solution.

Next we install the mounting screws through the backing  plate (with the inner being 775 and outer 1366) and twist into position. Then slide the backing plate into position to that the posts go through the holes. The next section is slide the four black mounting pillars onto the posts and secure tightly.  Please note that the motherboard was previously used for sub zero (hence the remains of blue putty eraser) overclocking.

We place the two plates marked ‘Intel’ upon the pillars and retain these in position with the four chrome mounting nuts. Once this has been accomplished we carefully remove the last application of Thermal paste by using a few drops of Isopropyl alcohol onto the processor and allow the liquid to soak in. After this has been accomplished then all that is needed is a cotton bud to wipe off the (DO NOT scrub ) old thermal paste. Next we apply Innovation Cooling’s (we use this as standard as it is one of the best on the market) IC Diamond (available at Overclockers UK for around £6.98) as we never  employ the bundled paste as usually it is an inferior solution.

Lastly we position the heatsink tower upon the central processing unit-erstwhile making sure that the clear film has been taken off the base section, with the position of the former is dependent on where the retaining plates have been placed. The final part is to place the cross-piece with rests on the retaining plates and the tower section and it is a simple matter of screwing the clip down.

The final part is mounting the 140mm Wing Boost fan onto the heatsink by the use of the supplied clips, of which is the standard. However Alpenfohn have had the foresight to include two extra clips to allow for a push-pull configuration.

The supplied fan power cable comes complete a pass-through section which allows the consumer to daisy-chain another so as to save precious fan connectors on the motherboard.

Well that is is for the installation phase of this article, so without further aplomb let us look at the testing section.

Testing

We tested the performance of the Alpenfohn Brocken ECO by comparing it to another air cooling product; namely the old  OCZ Vendetta Two. We used this product as the testing system employed is a socket 775 motherboard.

Temperature measurements were taken at idle and at full load.

Idle temperatures were taken after 1 hour of prime 95 then allowed to cool down naturally for half an hour.

Realtemp 3.0 was used and only maximum readings where taken.

We also did some minor overclocking in order to further stress the system.

All ambient air temperatures were at 23.5 degrees

Equipment Used:

• Core 2 duo 6300 CPU
• DFI LANPARTY P45 UT T3RS motherboard
• 2x GEIL DDR2 800 ram; Two gigabyte in total
• OCZ Vendetta TWO for comparison purposes.

 Stock speeds 1.8 GHZ

At this speed, there is very little difference between the Alpenfohn Brocken and the OCZ Vendetta II even on full load the difference is only around one degree.

3 GHZ Overclock

Here we start to see around a one degree differential on idle to that of two to three degrees on full load, weather this is due to the fan differential 92mm on Vendetta and 140mm on the Brocken Eco or even the heatsink design itself we are yet to find out.

3.2 GHZ Overlcock

Once again we experience the same differential  of around two degrees so this makes us think that perhaps we now have an indicator of the overall performance level of this product over the OCZ Vendetta II

Unless we add a second fan on to the Alpenfohn product, then quite possibly there will be the same two degree performance difference if we overclocked them higher.  We did not expect miracles with the Alpenfohn product for the reasons we stated at the beginning of this review.

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