The Test
We thoroughly tested the Monsoon II Active TEC hybrid cooling solution from Vigor Gaming quite a while ago. Since then we have had no real reason to replace it as the main cooler in this particular testbed. Despite being loud, it tends to do quite a nice job keeping the CPU and surrounding area nice and cool. As the incumbent cooler in the system before the Vindicator, we tested it again to get some base values. Also included on the temperature graphs will be the stock Intel HSF, which is terrible.



Here you can see that both of the enthusiast-level cooling solutions performed pretty well. If these temperatures seem high to you, please remember that they are being recorded from the on-die diode. There are many different temperatures that can be called a CPU temperature. This particular one is called the CPU Tjunction. Many temperature monitoring programs report the temperature of the diode mounted on the motherboard directly underneath the processor, while still others use sensors located in the socket area. All of these are valid points of measurement provided whatever they are being compared to is recorded from the same point.

The Vindicator performs quite well, falling just 4 degrees short of Vigor’s Monsoon II at idle. Under load, the cooler also performs well at 6 degrees warmer. These numbers might seem large, but noise is not taken into consideration in our tests. While the Monsoon II TEC/Air hybrid unit performed better than the Vindicator, it did so rather audibly. The Vindicator on the other hand could not be heard - at all. Both coolers demolished the stock Intel cooler, which could not handle 10 minutes of full CPU load and sounded like a hair dryer.


Finally, in terms of overclocking performance, the coolers were able to reach the same maximum clock speed (3701MHz; 285x13). Although the Vindicator ran considerably warmer at 3701MHz, the system was able to run 3DMark06 equally well on both coolers. The stock Intel cooler could technically get up to 3200MHz, but at that speed we could not run anything without the system crashing.