Starting up the Vapochill LS: First Impressions
Once I held the power button for one second and released, I heard what sounded exactly like an air conditioner starting up. It had that characteristic raspy buzzing sound of a refrigerator or AC compressor. Within a few seconds the noise settled to a dull buzz that was still quite audible, but not nearly as loud. By default the fans spin at 75%, and are not terribly noisy. The Vapochill LS is not quiet, so I can pretty much guarantee that anyone looking for a silent PC will not be pleased with the unit’s noise levels. I have a slightly higher noise tolerance, so I was really not bothered much by the noise. It was a pleasant surprise to discover that after several days of use, the compressor noise was actually further reduced as the unit ‘broke in’ a bit. I wouldn’t consider it ‘roaring’ loud, like some high CFM ‘Tornado’ fans, but rather a different type of dull ‘compressor’ whine noise. After a while, your ears adjust and you easily tune it out.
For some more technical ‘noise level’ specifications, Asetek put together some thorough documentation.
Within several seconds of starting up the unit, the evaporator temperature starts to drop rapidly. It dropped from 26’C to about -10’C in 30 seconds or so. As soon as -10’C was hit on the evaporator, the PC came to life and started to boot normally. I was relieved to hear the post beep on the first boot up, and immediately went into the BIOS. Before I knew it, the evaporator was sitting happily at about -46’C and it did not take long for it to finally stabilize at -53’C while the PC was sitting idle in the BIOS. I saw my CPU temperature reported as -16’C according to the BIOS.
I expected lower CPU temperatures with the evaporator at -53C, but when I trolled around some cooling forums, I came to the conclusion that these system sensors were never calibrated for sub-zero accuracy, and they are likely off by quite a large margin. Without a high quality digital thermometer, it is difficult to determine exactly what the true CPU temperature is. I did not let this discourage me, as I was fairly certain that I had excellent contact between the evaporator and the CPU. I set everything to optimized defaults for my first boot.
Upon booting into Windows, everything appeared perfectly stable, and there were no signs of the ‘cold bug’ that plagued many of the Winchester and some of the Venice/San Diego based chips. This is certainly not a flaw on AMD’s behalf as sub-zero cooling is clearly not within the ‘operating temperature’ range. There is still a lot of mystery surrounding the cause of the cold bug, but it causes all sorts of odd instability at temperatures below 0’C. Many of the revision ‘E’ chips will never have any issues with a device like the ‘LS’ and may only exhibit problems under more extreme cooling methods.
Motherboard Monitor 5 gave me a different temperature reading than the BIOS, and was reporting about -24’C at idle and about -18’C at load. The evaporator temperature increases by about 10’C at load, which is an indication of good contact between the chip and the evaporator head. The evaporator is clearly ‘pumping’ away the excess heat at load.
I had to fight the urge to begin overclocking right off the bat and get the chill control panel software installed.
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