Cogage TRUE Spirit Review

My cheap INTEL I7 1366 cooler came the other day but I haven't had any time to install it until today when the power went out. You can pick the TRUE SPIRIT up for $40-50 US and for the performance it offers this is very reasonable.



My motherboard is the GA-EX58-UD3R (rev. 1.6) made by GIGABYTE and the heatsink fits nicely onto it. After installation however the heatsink could still be twisted quite a bit. It looks like the clip design doesn't really stop twisting movement which is very strange. You can use another washer apparently to sure it up, or use some form of sticky "tack". Even with this twisting movement it still cools very well from my tests.

The stock I7 cooler was letting my 920 D0 CPU get close to 95 degrees celcius per core when it was clocked at 3.5GHz. That is dangerous territory really, but since it only happened when 8 threads were active (very rare unless you encode videos or run RetroCopy) it never crashed on me. The Cogage TRUE SPIRIT managed 64 degrees steady at the same overclock, which is over 30 degrees better.



So now that the chip can be cooled, I'm at 4GHz Prime stable using 1.325V for the CPU and 1.27V for the QPI. These voltages are quite low compared to what I've seen others on, so there is probably room beyond 4GHz but for now it satisfies me.



This is an improvement of 0.7 MASTER SYSTEMs compared to my 3.5GHz score. This means you would need a 625MHz I7 to run a single SMS core at cycle accuracy with FM CHIP, not too bad.

All in all this is a very affordable I7 heatsink/cooler package. It performs extremely well and if you have an I7 you would be silly not to get it due to the increased speeds you can run. At 4GHz and with the TRUE SPIRIT temperatures are between 77-80C which is manageable for the I7, as long as it's under 85C it will be stable.