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Another interesting gadget from www.pccables.com.au turned up today. BTW, they are now at www.pccoolers.com (no .au suffix) too - good to see them concentrating on cooling stuff now. Cables aren't too exciting!

This unit is the K602, made by RDJD who have offices in the US, Ireland and Taiwan. I'd not heard of them before but they do have a fair range of coolers. I have a few of their products in for testing - look for a P2 / Athlon comparison soon.

The K602 is quite an interesting looking unit. RDJD's heatsinks all seem to operate around a fairly simple theme - lots of very thin folded aluminium fins. Their aim seems to be to get the maximum cooling for a low cost of manufacture - sounds like a sensible idea to me. Tom expects to be selling this unit for about $25.00 which puts it pretty low in the decent passive cooler price range. The unit doesn't feel incredibly strong, you can twist the chassis fairly easily. Also, the fan is a 52mm JMC unit, which moves 16cfm - not spectacular by any means. However, compared to a lot of the "monster" coolers, the K602 is quite tiny. It's only slightly larger than the Socket370 itself and not very tall - it blocks no memory slots on the Soyo SY-6VBA-133 motherboard which is narrower than most - the FDP-32 blocks 2 RAM slots completely and usually rests against the third DIMM. Even the CPM25603-32 rests against the end DIMM, which restricts airflow to the fan.

You can see the huge height difference between the RDJD K602 (left) and the FDP-32 (right) in this photo:

The mounting clip is fairly standard and would fit Socket370 or Socket7. It grips VERY firmly, though - probably rivalling the FDP-32's clip in terms of sheer heatsink-cpu pressure. It is supplied with a thermal pad attached - it looks similar to the ones supplied with the FDP-32 and FEP-32, a white paste covered by a thin blue plastic film which has a white label half-attached. The theory with these things (on the FDP/FEP) is that you pull the white label off, which pulls the blue plastic layer off to reveal the white thermal paste beneath. Fine. However, I've had at least 5 emails from people saying "These blue thermal pads are crap!!" .. because the blue plastic often stays attached, is tricky to pull off and makes a really bad conductor of heat off the CPU. Still with me? Good. The K602 has the same problem. In fact, on this unit it seems to be even harder to remove the blue plastic - I had to heat the unit up by running it for a while with the plastic on, then rip the plastic off (taking the mesh from the thermal pad with it). There must be a better way to do this. I tested the unit with the pad on, and then with the thermal pad removed and some thermal paste applied also. All the other coolers compared were running without their thermal pad and with thermal paste applied (so their performance is a little better than standard).

I compared it to the GlobalWin FDP-32 (as reviewed in the original Socket370 cooler comparo here) and the new Socket370 cooling King, the SuperDual Twin-Fan Socket370 (reviewed here), one of the "better" retail Intel coolers (for the difference between the retail units see here) and, something more in it's price range, the Globalwin CPM25603-32. I tried it with the fan blowing in (onto the heatsink, as shipped) and blowing out. As usual, this is on my Soyo SY-6VBA-133 motherboard as it can read the internal CPU temperature diode. I used a C400 at 600MHz, 2.3v, on an MSI 6905 v1.1 slocket. The ambient temp was 25.4C for the duration of the tests. I tested each unit for 20 minutes of Quake 3 with SETI running to catch any spare CPU cycles.

Curiously, the K602 seems louder than the other coolers. This is odd given the relative amounts of air being moved around. The Intel retail unit showed itself to be in it's usual form, consistently crashing about 4 minutes into the test. The SuperDual emulated it's performance from the previous review, beating the FDP-32 by a clear degree. The results marked with an asterisk (*) indicate there were some stability issues during the test - for example, the CPM locked solid after about 10 minutes in one test but completed it fine after a cool down and restart. About 15 minutes into both test runs the K602 had an "application error" in Win98 that killed Q3, but no solid lockups - I could restart Q3 and keep playing until the 20 mins was up. Keep in mind that the CPU used for testing is a heat monster - fully sanded and 2.3v. I wouldn't recommend either the K602 or the Globalwin CPM unit for such beasts - for a 2.2v chip or below they would be better suited. Turning the fan around made no difference to the unit, but (as expected) ditching the thermal pad and using some decent thermal paste ($4.00 from your local Tandy) worked wonders.

Overall, I'd put the K602 in fairly good stead - in standard form it boasts performance not far from the "monster" coolers, for just over half the price. It seems to perform slightly better than the Globalwin CPM unit which is more in it's price range. I have to wonder how it would go with a stronger fan - sadly, mounting the 60mm Y.S.Tech fan as used on the FDP-32 wasn't going to happen due to the shroud on the K602 blocking most of the fins when a larger fan is used. However, as it's so tiny, I can't imagine you would have trouble mounting it on pretty much any motherboard or slocket and it is definitely worth considering if you have space issues, particularly RAM-slot blockage when using a slocket. Tom will have them in stock in about mid January..