-- CompuNurse
Temperature Probe
-- Price: $15.00
USD
-- 6.30.2001
-- By: GideonX
-- Page: 1
Often times, through our temperature testings with
heatsinks we tend to rely heavily on the temperature sensors on your
motherboard. While they do provide the degrees on the CPU and
the motherboard, many times this temperature is not exactly the most
accurate. Some of the sensors for the CPU are right underneath
the chip itself in the middle of the socket. Not exactly the
ideal location for tracking temps!
So what I used to do was take my home made
temperature probe I made out of a cheap Radio Shack case temp. LCD
(you probably remember this from a while ago...these things were $5
a pop). This worked for quite some time and eventually this
thing did what most Radio Shack products do, it died. Battery
replacement didn't work, this just flat out died on me one day.
Since that died, and our testing required an easy
accessible probe, we called upon one of our new sponsors, 1
Cool PC to provide us with an answer. If you visit 1 Cool
PC, you may notice it looks like 3DFXCool, well...it is. They
just went through some name changes, still the same rock solid store
from way back in the day. Anyway, I was talking to Bart (he
owns the shop) and he sent over a nice little unit called the
CompuNurse. From the packaging, this product was meant to be
simple. If you didn't know what it was used for, then you
probably bought the wrong thing.
There are no instructions, there is just an LCD
screen with temperature readings in celcius and a black probe comes
out of it.
From the packaging:
- Temperature Range: -40C to 90C
- Accuracy: 1C
- Sampling: 3 seconds constant
- Battery: 1 X G10 (Circle)
A good range of temperatures to work with, with a
accuracy boasting of just 1 degree celcius away. Now instead
of bare wires coming out of the unit like the one we made ourselves,
this one comes wired completely. I tried to tug the wire out
with a little force to see if it could take some GideonTech
pounding, it put up a good fight so I gave up on the breaking of
this unit (we rather need it to finish this review).
To test out how accurate this unit is against the
normally used motherboard sensors, we strapped this probe to our AMD
Thunderbird 800Mhz Chip. The wire measures about 3 foot long,
so you can position this anywhere in the case and mount it on one of
your drive bays if needed.
From that picture, you can see we
strapped this bad boy using a small piece of electric tape. It
keeps it in place so we won't lose our spot. The tip of the
probe is positioned as close to the CPU slug as possible. Most
of the heat transfer is going to occur in this area, so we might as
well document it.
Ok, that Thunderbird has seen a major
beating. That's from all the abuse we put on it, but it still
is cranking, kudos to AMD for making this tough worker.
Here's another picture from a far, it
fits right under the heatsink without obstructing the slug and
heatsink contact area.
Our test system is as follows:
After doing a boot up, we check the
idle temperatures of our 800mhz Tbird using VIA's Hardware Monitor.
We also use the chip at full load, running the RC5
Client and 3D
Mark 2k1 at the same time.
The VIA Hardware Monitor takes the
temperature reading directly from the motherboard's sensors.
Here are the results:
| Ambient Temp: 30.5C |
Idle |
Full
Load |
| Via Hardware
Mon. |
37C |
39C |
| CompuNurse
Probe |
40C |
41.9C |
The temperatures are rather close, only
a few degrees off in each test. I certainly prefer an external
temperature probe as compared to the one located on the motherboard
itself. The reading is more precise in my opinion. You
can also position this probe in different areas like the video card
or a specific spot in your case. So this unit is rather handy
to have if you do a lot of trouble shooting, or just testing like we
do here.
Pros:
- Light and easy to use
- Very affordable solution
Cons:
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Hope you enjoyed this quick review,
this unit should provide enough hours of use for us through our
temperature related reviews.
Thanks to Bart over at 1 Cool PC for
providing us with our test unit, if you need anything cooling
related, check them folks out. They've been in the business
for a long time, they know what they are doing : )
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