Spire Rotor Photographs

Looking like an overweight flying saucer, the Spire Rotor comes out of its packaging and sports a rather attractive blue fan. In order to cool the whole product down, Spire has decided to use a fan that has a maximum rate of 2200 RPM, which should be able to deal with many of today’s processor intensive tasks.

 What is noticeable is the AMD retention mounting clip that is installed by default. However upon closer reading of the instruction manual, the aforementioned mechanism also serves for Intel processors.

The fins feel durable, unlike some of the cheaper models available from your back-street computer shop, and should be able to take some rough handling by heavy-handed enthusiasts. Whilst we look at the durable fins, we can see that they are tightly packed together in order to squeeze in as many of the aforementioned as possible. The reason for this (as is evident) is because this product is of a low-profile type, so it should excel in media based computers.

Lastly we examine the cable for the fan power. The former-mentioned is a nicely braided white scheme, then for some unknown reason the effect is ruined by the use black heatshrink.

Testing

The methodology we used in testing Spire Rotor DT-HP was to compare against a rather effective product known as the Gemini Two-Mark Four. Both products were tested using IC Diamond thermal compound and then a days worth of curing was undergone in order to give both coolers a fair chance. Ambient temperature was a constant 23.7c in all tests, and idle tests were gained by running prime 95 for one hour then letting the processor cool down naturally for half an hour. All readings were taking by using ‘Realtemp’ and by using the ‘maximum temperature readouts only!

Equipment Used

• DFI X48 DK Lanparty Motherboard
• Core 2 duo 6320 CPU 1.8GHZ at Default
• 2x GEIL DDR2 800 RAM
• Coolermaster Gemini Two Mark Four (For comparison purposes only)

Finally an overclock reaching 3.2 gigahertz

If we examine the above data we can conclude that not only does the Coolermaster model perform more efficiently, but there is less of a variance between the processor cores, in regards to the temperature read outs. Now the next question that must be asked is ‘why can a product obviously designed for HTPC’s outperform another designed for the same?’  Both products are within the same price bracket and are designed differently. It could be for the reason that the Spire Rotor uses a modified version of the standard Intel heatsink mounting bracket, meanwhile, the Coolermaster Gemini Two Mark Four utilizes a clamping mechanism where a backing plate is involved.

The photos below show the differing mechanisms with Spire product being the first and the Coolermaster model the latter.

The results above show that you can have a great heatsink and as high a fin count as you wish, but if contact with the CPU is not as effective, then all other features are rendered useless.