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When settling on a high end air cooler that most people can afford, we really had no hesitation in shortlisting the Noctua NH D14 heatsink, which we affectionately have dubbed the “Austrian Sandwich”. This cooler has yet to be dethroned as the best heatsink on the market, and while some publications have been rather dismissive of this solution, we simply have yet to use a more formidable air cooler.
The only downside is the £70 asking price, but in this case it really is worth every penny. I can think of no better partner for an unlocked processor.
For our review today, we added an additional 14cm Noctua fan, settling on a 14cmx2 and 12cmx1 configuration – blowing air in tandem from right to left. This produces very little noise but creates massive levels of airflow, and even at 4.4ghz with 1.575 volts coursing through the processor, the heatsink remained cool to the touch. While the Antec Dark Fleet DF 85 has also received critical attacks due to its somewhat unusual appearance, it is one of the best airflow chassis on the market with 7 large (quiet) fans installed.
It is worth addressing the AMD temperature guidelines, because they state that a 62c thermal threshold should not be exceeded. We actually agree with them on this, and prefer to see the X6 or X4 processors hitting load at no more than 55c (especially when under extra voltage). AMD motherboards can be rather flaky when it comes to temperature readings so we placed a diode on the CPU to measure temperatures at various speeds and voltages.
Room temperature was held at 24c with air conditioning.
As expected the Noctua NH D14 delivers fantastic cooling levels, recording a maximum temperature of 53c at 4.4ghz.
I really dont get the Quad core releases, its just opening them up for a butchering. the 6 cores even get beaten.
They need to massively drop the prices to slot in behind the 6 core versions of their chips or just ditch this range totally.
1055t is still their best chip for the money, ive seen it on sale for £120 recently. why would you pay £140 or £150 for this 980BE?
Their GPU division seems much better organised imo
The problem AMD face is that these chips are actually really good, but Intel are 1-2 years ahead on a design level. It just shows how good those new Core i5’s are.
fair review, I bought a 1090t last month and its great, but the cores thing makes sense to me. If they can make good 6 cores, why not just ditch the 4 cores entirely? Its not like their designs dominate and Intel are taking the low end, making it sensible.
The pricing is way off.
Just what we need, another 100mhz for the same price as before. which does absolutely nothing to compete against Intel.
Even their six cores are so far behind, so whats the point of this? Why not bring out a six core chip like the 1100T, but clock it to 4ghz (they all run at this no problem), and just be done with it all until bulldozer. Even that is very boring, but at least at 4ghz it might seem interesting.