Tech Review - Swiftech MCX478 Cooler

Hello again, my name is Rodney Reynolds and welcome to another video review. Today, I will be looking at the Swiftech MCX478 Cooler. What is included is the manual, the hardware that is needed to complete this installation, the fan and the cooler.

The heatsink here weighs 560 grams without the fan. With the fan it weighs a 730 gram. You can certainly see where all the weight comes from. It has 371 aluminum fins, this is basically to take away the heat from this massive thick copper base and of course, that base is nice and smooth therefore, being able to have a good contact between this and your CPU.

Also, the fan which comes with this is quite large, it’s an 80-mm fan and it’s quite fast at around 500 RPMs and the decibel level on this is around 49 dB. And this all the hardware that you will need to use to install this cooler properly and there are a few steps and I will go through those steps now.

The first step is to install these nylon knots and aluminum standoffs onto the motherboard. If your motherboard comes with a bracket like this, you will want to remove that bracket first and how this works is very simple. You put the nylon knot on the bottom of the motherboard and the aluminum standoff goes screwed down into the knot like so and just repeat these three other times.

The next part of this installation requires installing these brackets and socket screws right directly on the cooler itself. As you can see here on the cooler, there is a screw right here and there is also another screw hole right here and on the other side, there are two more and of course these brackets would get attached to these holes.

Once both brackets are mounted, go ahead then and mount the cooler onto the motherboard. The next thing you will want to do of course is to apply thermal compound to your particular CPU and also of course what you want to do here is line the bracket holes with the standoffs below.

This part of the installation is basically called the assemblies and what these assemblies do is mount the cooler right onto the motherboard itself. Now this here of course is a screw. You also have for each screw, two nylon flat washers and for each screw, you also have a spring.

First thing to do here is put the first nylon washer on. Next, insert the spring and finally insert the last nylon washer. Repeat those processes three other times then you will have these four assemblies. These assemblies then go right through the cooler connecting it and affixing it to the motherboard.

And of course you would put four of these one here, one through here and of course on the other side, there are two more and once you have that done, basically what this does is mount this cooler into the motherboard very securely. And once that is done, go ahead and the last part of this installation procedure is to install the fan on top of the cooler.

The fan also comes in a few parts of course, the fan itself, you have the grill and also you have four screws. Of course inserting these screws through the grill, then just place the screws down through the fan and then connect the fan into the cooler. And of course what happens here is that this screw goes down through this hole, this hole and the two on the other side affixing it very securely to the top of the cooler.

Once you have finished all of the installation of the heatsink and the fan, next thing of course to do is plug this directly into the power supply. Of course this spins and feeds power to the fan itself and right here is basically the sensor which goes plugged into the motherboard like so to sense the speed of the fan. Just to give you some indication of how loud this fan is, I will go ahead now and plug it in.

So it certainly is very loud. However, it is not as loud as some of the 7000 RPM 60-mm fans that are on the AMD systems and this certainly is not as quiet as the retail versions that come with the Pentium 4. But again, this cooler really is not meant to be quiet. It’s meant to keep the CPU very cool.

Now let me look at some temperature results from this cooler and you can see here the temperature is 38ºC at max load so, certainly some fantastic temperature results using this cooler.

As you can see this cooler does keep the temperature very, very low and that is certainly important especially if you are going to be overclocking your Pentium 4 CPU. I have a Pentium 4 1.6A at 2.4GHz, the voltage is at 1.5V. So some great results when it comes to temperatures on this cooler. The disadvantages with this cooler of course is one, price and two, the loudness of the fan itself. However, overall this is a great product.

Again, my name is Rodney Reynolds. This has been another video review. Be sure to check back very soon, I will have a brand new one for you then. Also, check out my website at www.3dgameman.com and while you are there, check out the forums. You can go in there and register, registration is free. And you can leave your own suggestions and comments and of course you can find out more information about this product and about all the products which I video reviewed. Until the next time, take care.