This review of the Thermalright SLK-800 and SK-7 will illustrate the temperature difference between the two heatsinks, as well as show the cooling effects of three different fans both pushing air onto and pulling air from the heatsink.

The SK-7

The SK-7 is an all copper 485 gram heatsink. The first thing notable about this heatsink is its weight. It is much heavier than the stock aluminum heatsink that comes with retail AMD processors. It comes securely packaged in a small cardboard box with the Thermalright logo printed on the top. Inside the box was a syringe of thermal paste, foam pads, and 8 wire fan clips. These clips connect to the base of the heatsink, and allow four fan sizes between 70mm to 80mm. The base of the heatsink is polished to a mirror finish, and the heatsink attaches securely to the motherboard with the use of a three pronged heat sink clip. The heat sink does not come packaged with a fan.

The SLK-800

The SLK-800 is an all copper 505 gram heatsink. It is more expensive than the SK-7, and the one I received did not come packaged with any thermal compound. It too was packaged securely in a small cardboard box. It came with foam pads, and two wire fan clips. The clips packaged width the SLK-800 fit into holes made in the side of the heatsink, and by changing which holes they
are placed in allow fan sizes from 60mm to 80mm. The SLK-800 uses a three pronged clip to attach itself to the heatsink, and during testing appeared to be extremely secure. Even with the heavy weight of the heatsink, I never felt the heatsink was insecure when moving my computer. This heatsink is also sold without a fan.

Differences Between the SK-7 and the SLK-800
Top


(SK-7 and SLK-800)
From the top these two heatsinks do not differ much from each other. Both use thin copper fins soldered to the solid copper base. The SK-7, on the left, is actually 9mm wider than the LK-800.
Bottom

(SK-7 and SLK-800)
When viewed from the bottom the difference between these two heatsinks becomes apparent. The SK-7 has a much larger, square base. The SLK-800 has a smaller rectangular base that does not restrict airflow. Both are polished to a mirror finish.
Side

(SK-7 and SLK-800)
The sides of the two heatsinks do not show much design differences. There are two notches in the fins of the SK-7 that are not present on the SLK-800. Both have steps on the edges to hold onto different size fans. On the side of the SLK-800 there are five sets of holes for the wire fan clips. The SK-7 has holes on the bottom of the heatsink for its four sets of fan clips.
Fins

(SK-7 and SLK-800)
The fins of both heatsinks are made from thin copper and welded to the base of the heatsink. The SK-7’s fins are folded over on the edge which helps them from bending. The SLK-800 has nothing to protect this, and without careful handling can be damaged. This picture also shows how the SLK-800 is taller and thinner than the SK-7.
Test Configuration
Fans
The test of these two heatsinks involved six different airflow configurations using two fans, a Zalman ZM-F1 and a Vantec Tornado. The Zalman fan is a standard 80mm by 25mm sized fan and comes with a resistor, which allows operating the fan at two different speeds. Normal operation at 12 volts pushes 39 Cubic Feet of air per Minute (CF/M) while being 34.4 decibels loud. With the resistor in place the Zalman pushes only 20.6 CF/M, but at a quiet 20 decibels. The second fan used is a Vantec Tornado. This is a monster 80mm x 38mm fan that pushes 84 CF/M at a loud 55 decibels. To make the test more interesting I tested this fans both pushing air down into the heatsinks, and pulling air out of them.

(specs from manufacturer)
System
The heatsinks are attached to the CPU using Arctic Silver 3 heat compound, using the detailed instructions on the companies website. The CPU used is an AMD Athlon XP 2100+ Palamino, one of the last Athlons manufactured on the .18 micron process. This also makes it one of the hottest running non-overclocked chips. The motherboard the chip is plugged into is an Epox 8RDA NForce2 based motherboard. This motherboard is installed in an Antec 830sx case with four NMB ultra quiet 18 CF/M case fans. Temperature is being read from the motherboard sensors using Motherboard Monitor 5.2.2.0. The temperature is first read after letting the system sit idle for half an hour. Then the Folding@Home client is started, and run for 30 minutes before the second reading. The same F@H work unit was used for all tests.

Results
SLK-800 Results

Here we see that the SLK-800 works best with air being pushed down into the fins. Pushing air onto the heatsink resulted in equal or lower temperatures than pulling air through the fins. As he airflow increased, so did the cooling. The best scores were achieved by the Vantec Tornado pushing air onto the heatsink.

SK-7 Results



Similar effects to the SLK-800 were resulted with the SK-7. The lowest temperatures were produced by having air pushed into the heatsink. The higher airflow fans also produced lower temperatures.

Comparison between SLK-800 and SK-7


In the comparison graphs we see that the SLK-800 outperforms the SK-7 in every test. The widest margins are seen with the lower airflow fans, with the delta between the two heatsinks reaching as high as 6 degrees Celsius. Even though the SLK-800 and SK-7 are nearly identical on paper, the SLK-800 has a better design that provides a cooler CPU at any airflow.

Summary of
Results

Test Setup

To conduct these tests I used a Western Digital 120 gigabyte hard drive inside a Bytecc ME-320U2F external drive enclosure. This enclosure can accept IDE hard drives up to 300 gigabytes, and connect to a computer using either USB2 or Firewire. The enclosure accomplishes this by using a Oxford 911 chip for Firewire, and an Ali chip for the USB2.

I performed USB2 and Firewire tests on two computers. A desktop computer using an NForce2 motherboard with a PCI Firewire card, and a Centrino laptop with both USB2 and Firewire built in. The IDE test was performed on the Desktop machine, and is for reference.

Test Configuration

External Enclosure:
Bytecc ME-320U2F
Firewire chip: Oxford 911
USB2 chip: Ali
Western Digial 120 Gigabyte 8 Megabyte Cache Hard Drive

Laptop:
IBM Thinkpad X31
Windows XP Professional SP1
Firewire chip: Ricoh R5C552
USB2 chip: Intel 82801DB/DBM

Desktop:
Epox 8RDA NForce2 Motherboard
Windows XP Professional SP1
Firewire chip: Texas Instruments TSB12LV26
USB2 chip: NForce2

Tests

All tests were performed using HDTach 2.6

Conclusion

From these results we see that Firewire trounced USB2 in two ways. The first was that data was read almost twice as fast as USB2. Writing data occurred at similar speeds using both Firewire and USB2. The second advantage appeared from the CPU utilization. On both computers, Firewire used a significantly less amount of the CPU than USB2 when transferring data. According to these benchmarks, Firewire appears to be the better choice for an external hard drive.

Choosing the right boot loader depends on the operating system that will be installed on the computer. This review covers six popular boot loaders, and the features and downfalls of each.

What is a boot loader (in more depth)?

A boot loader is the first piece of software used when a computer is booting. When the power switch is turned on the computer’s BIOS runs a series of checks it loads from firmware. When finished, the BIOS attempts to start an operating system from the hard drive. When a boot loader is installed it starts instead of an operating system. An increasing number operating systems install a boot loader by default, even if they are the only operating system on the computer.

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In order for the BIOS to load an OS it looks for instructions on the first sector of a hard drive. On the first sector of the hard drive resides the master boot record (MBR), and is where a boot loader is initialized. Depending on the boot loader, additional files may be stored and read from a partition on the hard drive. After this step the boot loader begins to start the operating system, and is not used again until the next boot. If the computer has only one operating system, the boot loader may not ask for user input. Because of this, many people do not realize they have a boot loader installed.

Moving Beyond One Operating System

This setup using the default boot loader of the installed OS works well and never need to be configured or interacted with, until a second OS is to be added to the computer. Once the requirement of loading more than one operating system exists, many boot loaders, including the one shipped with Windows 98, no longer work. This is where a third party boot loader must be chosen. This page will help with that decision by comparing six popular boot loaders: LILO, GRUB, XOSL, System Commander, Boot Magic, and NTLDR.

Comparison of the Boot Loaders

LILO

LILO is short for LInux LOader. It is open source and has been around for a long time. Its strengths include strong support from the community, being able to load a wide variety of operating systems, being able to load the Linux kernel, and being free. LILO must be installed and configured from an environment that can run the LILO executable (normally Linux and BSD). Once installed, a config file exists on the hard drive that, when edited, will change the OSes that can be booted. After editing this file, the LILO command will need to be run to update the changes in the MBR. This is not required in GRUB. One nice feature of LILO is the ability to copy itself to a floppy, allowing normal bootup of the host PC if the normal MBR is accidentally overwritten. The LILO menu on bootup is text-only, and can be in the form of a menu or prompt. If nothing is displayed at the prompt, hit to display a list of booting options.

GRUB

GRUB, short for GRand Unified Bootloader, is another open source boot loader. GRUB has been slowly taking over LILO’s place as the default boot loader shipped with many Linux distributions. This is because of several features GRUB has that LILO does not. The first being that GRUB can be configured from within itself. If configured wrong, the user is not stuck with a unbootable computer, as the configuration can be changed from within GRUB. GRUB, while being a text menu, also supports background images, giving it the ability to impress your friends. GRUB also supports virtually any operating system that will run on x86 architecture. The only downfall to GRUB is that it requires files on the hard drive, usually on a Linux (ext2) partition.

XOSL

XOSL is short for Extended Operating System Loader, and again is open source under the GPL license. XOSL is different from LILO and GRUB because it is a graphical boot loader, supporting resolutions up to 1600×1200. Like GRUB it supports configuration from within itself, but XOSL has several limitations. The XOSL installation manual suggests installing from true DOS into a FAT12 or FAT16 partition. NTFS partitions are rumored to work, but installation would need to take place through a DOS boot disk with NTFS drivers, or through Windows itself. XOSL also cannot boot the Linux kernel, making LILO or GRUB a required install to boot Linux.

System Commander 7

System Commander 7 from V Communications is a great boot loader for all different operating systems, as long as one of them is Windows or Dos. System Commander supports installation in Fat, Fat32, and has the rare support of installation in a NTFS partition. Like XOSL it is graphical, supporting resolutions up to 1600×1200. System Commander is also the only boot loader to claim support every operating system created for x86 architecture. It is configured within itself, and supports automatic searching for installed operating systems. The only downfall to System Commander is its price is hard to justify next to the free boot loaders, 59.95 for the download or 69.95 for a shipped product.

Boot Magic

Boot Magic is a boot loader that comes only with the purchase of Partition Magic software. It differs from the other boot loaders because it must be installed in a FAT or FAT32 partition from within Windows. Boot Magic is also configured from within Windows, a feature making easier initial setup, but a more difficult recovery if a problem occurs. It’s limited support requiring Windows and a FAT partition make boot magic a choice only for limited configurations.

NTLDR

NTLDR comes with versions of Windows based on the NT kernel, including 2000 and XP. Hidden by default and not well documented, NTLDR appears to be designed only to switch between Windows 9x and NT. It has been discovered that it is possible to boot older versions of DOS and even Linux by editing the boot.ini file on the Windows partition. This is a great option for users wanting the change the least amount of options when installing a second operating system on their computer.

First, the specs (straight from Lexar)…

• Capable of 6.0 MB/s sustained read speed in USB 2.0 system
• Capable of 4.5 MB/s sustained write speed in USB 2.0 system
• Compatible with the USB 2.0 specification
• Windows 98SE/Me/2000/XP
• Mac OS X, Mac OS 8.6 or above
• 77.4mm x 26.8mm x 11.0mm

Benchmarks

Test system:
AMD Athlon XP 2800+
Epox 8RDA Motherboard
Western Digital 120 GB 8 MB Cache Hard Drive
Windows XP Service Pack 1
NForce Unified Driver 2.45

Usefulness

Being both a student and a part-time computer tech, I have found the JumpDrive Pro to be more convenient than I had initially expected. I find myself using the JumpDrive Pro every day at work. I have stored a collection of virus-cleaning tools, system patches, and some diagnostic tools. There is nothing more aggravating than installing a new system, then realizing that the network card drivers are 10 megs and the only storage device available is a floppy. The JumpDrive Pro excels in that kind of situation.

For school I can throw files onto the device before running to class. On campus I can go into any computer lab and instantly have access to my files.

Compatibility

I have come across many different computer configurations at school and work and can say that the JumpDrive Pro handles everything it has come against. So far that includes various computers running Windows 2000 and XP, and Mac OS 9 and X. The only time it did not work was when I had it plugged into the keyboard of a G4 Mac. Mac OS 9 informed me that the USB bus did not have enough power to drive it. I moved it to a USB port on the back of the computer, and it worked flawlessly from there. I would estimate the number of computers I have used it with to be around 40, and I have yet to install drivers.

I have used it on only one Linux box, my own running Gentoo. I had SCSI and USB media options already compiled into the kernel for a USB Smartmedia drive, so when I plugged in the JumpDrive Pro it was automatically detected as a SCSI device. A simple “mount” command was all I needed to have full access to the device.

Conclusion

I have found the Lexar Jumpdrive Pro to be extremely useful in everyday activites. It is a great tool because it holds much more data than a floppy, is quicker to write files to than a CDR, and still works with a huge range of computers. I can not see myself ever getting rid of this device. It has become an essential piece of equipment.

I was happy to see that my new drive was based on the 60 GB/platter technology. I
cloned the disk using Norton Ghost and proceeded to run some rough benchmarks on
the two drives. Remember, these results are for the drives in the system I use everyday

and should not be compared to any other benchmarks on the net. Their purpose is only
to illustrate the difference between the 40 and 60 GB/platter Western Digital WD1200JB
hard drives.

Some Information:

Sector Counts:

40 GB/platter: 234375000

60 GB/platter: 234441648

System:

AMD Athlon XP 2100+ (Palomino)

Epox 8RDA Nforce2 Motherboard

768 MB PC2100 DDR RAM

Windows XP Professional SP1

Gentoo Linux (kernel 2.4.20)

Benchmarks:

From these simple tests we see that the drive based on the 60 GB/platter technology is a
small amount faster in the Windows benchmark. Running hdparm in Linux shows the
same sustained transfer speeds when reading data from the disk. The most interesting
piece of information came from the hdparm buffer reads, where the 60 GB/platter drive
had buffer reads almost 16% faster than the 40 GB/platter drive. Since it has an 8
megabyte buffer, this drive could theoretically take a large lead over the previous
generation in speed tests, but in most cases the speed difference will not be noticeable.