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Don't you hate it when you have a good idea, but you don't do anything about it and eventually discover someone else has? Those of you who read my Socket370 Cooler Comparison from a few months ago will probably remember the surprise entry, a dual-fan socket-370 unit that looked the goods but was basically junk. At the time I thought the problem was either the low-rpm fans or the design of the heatsink unit itself, and said I'd stick some big fans on it one day to see if that made it live up to it's impressive looks. Well, I never got around to it. Tom Dahne from www.pccables.com.au, however, is obviously much more the dynamic man of action than me. He mounted a couple of the ever-present Y.S.Tech double ball-bearing 60mm fans (as found on many of Globalwin's coolers, including the FDP-32, FEP-32 and CPM25603-32) onto one of these units and sent it over for me to check out.

Well, it certainly looks the business. A funky blue adonized aluminium heatsink with 2 socking great fans on top of it. Together, these fans are moving 52 cubic feet of air per minute - that's pretty impressive. This is, of course, twice as much as the winner of my previous Socket370 cooler comparison, the FDP-32. Also, on many coolers a lot of air is lost out of the side of the heatsink as it is blown down and OUT by the fan before it can really contact much of the sink itself. As you can see in this side shot below, a lot of the air escaping at an angle from the bottom of the fans will hit the deep centre part of the sink, where it needs cooling the most.

The unit looks huge, but it's actually quite deceptive. It can fit into places where some of the big single-fan units have trouble, because it's nowhere near as tall. For example, Soyo motherboards are commonly quite narrow. On the Soyo SY-6VBA-133 the FDP-32 on a slocket blocks 2 RAM slots and very nearly a third (lucky it's got 4 slots!). This unit doesn't block ANY slots.

In the bottom photo you can probably see the square hole in the middle of the sink. This is to allow you to slide the mounting clip across the unit and mount it at 90 degrees to the way I've shown it. Obviously you don't want to do that if you're putting it on a slocket - it would stop you inserting the slocket into the motherboard - but if you're mounting the unit on a Socket370 motherboard this gives you another option to avoid fouling cables or connectors. In these shots I've shown the unit mounted on a CPU in an MSI 6905 v1.1 slocket adapter. You can see it clears the capacitors on that slocket pretty easily - the wings are pretty tall and would be safe from fouling most motherboards. The problem can be getting the unit to actually fit in your case, though. For example on the BP6, the 2 sockets are right at the top of the board and hence right under the power supply. This means you can't mount the units side by side, up-and-down in the case because they stick up past the edge of the motherboard and hit the power supply. You can't mount them sideways either as they would hit each other due to the closeness of the sockets. I don't have any single-cpu Socket370 motherboards here - you might want to look into what connectors etc are near your socket before investing in one of these monsters. The mounting clip is fairly fiddly - it's very stiff (and yet doesn't seem to hold on quite as tight as the FDP-32) and, mounted as shown in the photos, the heatsink makes it hard to get your fingers in there to slide the clip over the socket lugs. It's not like you're going to be popping this thing on and off very often, though..

So, after all that, how does it perform? I thought I'd compare it to the FDP-32, as it's the reigning Socket370 king here. As usual I used the Soyo SY-6VBA-133 motherboard because it can monitor the internal CPU temperature. For a CPU I used a Celeron 400 at 600MHz, 2.3v. I spent a pleasant afternoon playing Quake3, swapping the heatsinks between the Super Dual and the FDP-32 every 30 minutes, cleaning and re-applying thermal paste each time. 6 tests in total, the last 2 with the case fan turned off. The big news is that this unit was consistently 1 degree C cooler than the FDP-32! Now, I know, one degree celcius is not going to blow anyone's socks off - but consider that that's one degree celcius less than the best socket370 cooler I've seen. Also, it opens up some options for people who need to use a lot of RAM slots or who have other size issues with the really tall coolers. The icing on the cake is that Tom sells the FDP-32 for AUD$45.00 whereas this unit will be $40.00 - both units include free thermal paste.

This is a prototype for now. Based on these results, Tom is ordering in a bunch more of the base heatsinks and fans and expects to be shipping units in about a month. Also, he says he's going to look at a better mounting clip, one that's less fiddly and mounts a little more firmly. Finally, he's also going to look into the best way to power the 2 fans - the unit I tested had a 3-wire intelligent connector on each fan, and I used a y-connector to put them both on one motherboard plug. He might supply future units with 1 4-pin Molex connector (like a HDD) and 1 intelligent fan. I'll let you guys know when they're available - again, about a month or so.