Cooling DangerDen Maze4

Taken from the DangerDen Website.... dated June 1st.

Has anybody seen / tried one of these?

 

I have

I'm founder of Elite Technology and we have recently gotten a MAZE4. An article/review of it as well as the DangerDen watercooling kit will be on our site in a few days.

http://www.elite-tech.org

 

Out of interest, do DD sponsor you or someone else?

 

Well sorta...

I'm the founder of Elite Technology and I contacted DangerDen about watercooling and talked to them for quite a while. They then offered to send me the MAZE4 a few weeks ahead of distribution.

 

http://www.elite-tech.org/reviews/maze4/ Its alive!!!

 

haha.. DD decided to use bayres instead of their own clear res

holly molly 31c load that's great!

 

Thats what they sent us lol. It was part of the intro kit that brwnvij recieved in the mail

 

Thats because the DangerDen res is a pile of pants apparently

 

Is that not amazing? It cooled his XP down considerably lol. I feel blessed because my retail cooled P4 2.0 runs at 31C idle. Soon the retail cooling will go away and my cheap motherboard will disappear and I will be hitting temps probably lower than brwnvij cause its Intel and thats about it!

 

Might I recommend a pinch of salt.

No mention of ambient temperatures or how the temperatures were recorded.

I would suggest that the only time you take temperatures seiously is if the on board/chip diode is not used.

Still a nice review for getting "feeling" about the product. Though I tend to only trust temperatures from the likes of BillA.

It's curious that DangerDen wouldn't provide a block to BillA for testing, don't you think.

8-ball

 

Temperatures were recorded via motherboard monitor 5. We didn't want to squash a thermosistor inbetween the block and the cpu because we didn't want it to affect the thermal transfer. Ambient temperature was about 78F which is 26C. We were not supplied the Maze 4 for free but we got a discount because we wrote the review. This is probably why BillA was not supplied a Maze 4 for review.

 

Seriously? That's pretty dodgey, you've got to wonder why? If it's as good as they reckon it is you've thought they be desparate to pimp it as much as possible...

 

I was talking about them not sending a maze 3 for review earlier on. BillA is no longer doing his testing.

And as for not sending BillA one because he wouldn't pay. You seem not to understand how BillA works.

Companies, such as d-tek, innovatec, ocpc, becooling, swiftech, and so on, paid him to do the testing, such is the value of his results. In fact, he charged several hundred dollars for the testing of a commercial waterblock.

Why?

Because he did incredibly thorough testing, over several months, using well over $10,000 worth of testing equipment.

MBM and similar programs which take readings from the onchip diodes are simply not accurate enough to support claims of performance. A large number of the watercooling poulation are getting a little fed up with the seemingly bogus performance claims often used.

I'm not saying the danger den blocks are good or bad, it just seems a little odd that they weren't prepared to submit a block for testing to prove it's worth in comparison with its competitors.

Oh, and 31 degrees at full load in an ambient of 26 degrees implies (for lets say a 70W load, which is reasonable for an overclocked athlon) a C/W (thermal resistance) for the whole loop of 0.07

Not bad for an entire cooling loop, especially as the BEST blocks on the market have a thermal resistance around 0.2 and that doesn't take into account the radiator.

So no, the cpu wasn't at 31 degrees, it is hotter, and I'd be willing to bet over 40 degrees. But that is the danger of trusting everything that MBM tells you.

 

I am prepared to set up complete testing of temperature over the next few days including a thermosistor that is completely calibrated and sent to an LCD display. Is there any other way that I could accurately judge temperature? I guess our comparison goes from the difference MBM said for the Volcano 9 (56C to 59C) as the Maze 4 produced temps of 29C to 31C.

 

No offence, but as 8-Ball has mentioned, that review tells us very little, if anything at all about the block's performance.

It has got some nice pictures of the block, although I still think it's ugly!

 

Ok, my inital MAZE4 article was ****ty. A new one will be posted in a bit comparing the MAZE4 to the Volcano9 as well as temp read-outs of idle and load tests.

 

The point I was trying to make was that you (probably) don't own the right equipment to do a block test which would be valid. All most sites can offer in terms of block reviews is a nice overview of it's looks and mounting procedure really. It's just a general problem with block reviews in general, very few are valid.

 

Thats true. I dont have the right equipment however I think a few people I know do. I never though about it from that perspective before and will be sure to try and get that equipment to do testing with.

 

Just to give you an idea of a valid review, here's one of BillA's:

http://www.overclockers.com/articles683/index02.asp

 

I'm not saying it is a bad review, just that one needs to understand AND accept the limitations imposed by testing components on a system vs accurate bench testing.

The temperatures you have quoted are by no means accurate temperatures. However, they DO clearly show that the dangerden kit performs MUCH better than the HSF used for comparison.

As such, you can do no more than say that the kit is better than aircooling, unless you are prepared to go down the route BillA did.

If you are interested, here are some interesting pages from BillA's webpage.

http://www.thermal-management-testing.com/bench_vs_system_testing.htm
http://thermal-management-testing.com/methodology.htm

Here is a list of the equipment BillA uses

http://thermal-management-testing.com/test_equipment_list.htm

I'm not trying to put your review down, simply that you have to consider what conclusions you can ACTUALLY justify based on the testing carried out.

8-ball