Installation

Active Cool claim that the AC4G can be installed within any PC in less than 90 seconds. I seriously recommend that people take their time installing this cooler, I spent considerably more time than the listed 90 seconds on the installation. It is however very straight forward to install, and it doesn’t take an expert to do so. You simply install the control unit in a free PCI slot, install the TEC + heatsink + fan combination onto the CPU (remember to apply a paper thin layer of thermal grease), plug in the wires and you are ready to go.

The Test

I installed the AC4G in a test bed consisting of:

AMD Barton 2500+ CPU
EpoX 8RDA+ motherboard
256 MB PC3200 DDR RAM
80 GB Western Digital 8MB hard drive
GeForce4 TI4800SE
Chieftec Dragon with 2 x 80mm case fans, one in at the front and one out of the back.
Windows XP Pro SP1

I used 1 hour of folding@home to simulate full load and room temperature was a consistent 22 degrees celsius during all tests. I have tested the AC4G at both extra cool and extra quiet modes, and I have included results from the Poseidon water cooling kit and the stock Barton 2500+ cooler.

As you can see, the AC4G extra quiet performs on par with the stock AMD Barton cooler, and in extra cool mode it does perform a bit better. These results are quite disappointing, and the water cooling kit (reviewed here) performs much better and costs less than the AC4G.

I ran some tests at overclocked speed as well, at 1.8 Vcore and 2200 MHz. The stock cooler could not handle this speed so it is not included in this test. Results can be seen above, and clearly show how the AC4G is incapable of keeping the CPU cool with increased Vcore and speed.

Noise levels in extra quiet mode are low, and the unit is just audible. However, in extra cool mode the noise level rises quite a bit.

Modifications

As I was very disappointed in the cooling abilities of the AC4G, I decided to try another fan on the CPU to see if that could help cooling performance. I replaced the stock fan with a larger 80mm ADDA fan as you can see from the picture below. I used Arctic Silver III this time instead of the thermal grease that was supplied with the cooler.

Here you can see the new fan compared with the stock fan

The “modded” cooling unit

I found that my modifications did help cooling performance somewhat, but not nearly enough to make this cooler a competitor on the high end computer scene of today. Results below:

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