While hunched over a motherboard and wrestling with those silly little tabs on a CPU cooler the other day, PCMag Senior Editor Matthew Murray asked a question: To what extent do different coolers affect system performance? My knee-jerk reaction was to scoff. How much of a role could that hunk of metal play in speed? Sure, a computer might be able to run a bit cooler and therefore be more receptive to overclocking, but I wouldn’t say that the cooler is impacting performance—running the CPU faster is doing that.

But is that really accurate? It turns out that the relationship between that cooler and the other components in the PC is a bit more complex.

Corsair just sent over an e-mail that makes a completely different case for the CPU cooler, noting that today’s high-performance DDR3 memory can markedly increase CPU temperatures, due to the higher CPU VTT voltages and Uncore clock speeds required by the memory controller in the Core i7 processor.

The email points out that


Corsair: Testing CPU Coolers

When Matthew and I first discussed the performance issue, I made the mistake of thinking about the CPU in isolation from the rest of the system. But with integrated memory controllers, today’s processors are more related than ever to your system’s other components; boost the speed of your memory and the CPU overheats. A better CPU cooler lets you run faster memory. Fascinating!

Now the question is whether we can trust Corsair’s conclusion: that standard CPU cooling solutions are inadequate for effectively cooling a Core i7-based PC using memory at frequencies above 1,600MHz.Based on the company’s testing, I’ll certainly think twice in the future about the components I use when building systems. But are stock coolers really that weak? Write in, and let me know what you’re using. I’m guessing some folks have standard coolers that work just fine.