Hardware Bistro

Company Profile

Deepcool was founded with the mission of providing the best performance & humanized thermal solutions for worldwide customers. Deepcool design and manufacture a comprehensive range of high quality products, covering desktop cooling solutions, laptop cooling solutions, server cooling solutions, embedded cooling solutions, and other thermal components. Our goal is to maintain customer satisfaction by serving our customer's ever-changing thermal needs and providing the quickest and most comprehensive service available.

Package & Contents

Deepcool Ice Matrix 600 comes with a pretty huge container with quarter see through window. Everything is packed nicely and accessories are kept inside another smaller box. However we prefer a much simple packaging way as we could not restore back to the original packaging; leave with two unknown plastic caps sweat :S

Deepcool Ice Matrix 600 is another universal CPU cooler and hence it comes with plenty of accessories such as back plates, fan clips, mounting bars, thermal grease, low-noise adapter, 4-pin PSU adapter, thumb screws, nuts and washers.

Three back plates are given to support different sockets but we do hope all these three back plates can be merged into a single back plate to reduce the complexity. Deepcool Ice Matrix 600 only comes with a single cooling fan but two sets of fan clips are given; good news for PC enthusiasts.

A Closer Look on Deepcool Ice Matrix 600

As we mentioned above, Deepcool has a wide range of products and Ice Matrix 600 is just one of their latest toys. Other Deepcool's new CPU coolers are Fiend Shark series, Ice Matrix 400 series, Tiger Shark, Ice Wind, Iceedge series and etc. Deepcool Ice Matrix 600 is able to support up to 150W Intel CPU and 140W for AMD CPU.

Tower CPU cooler is the most popular form factor for CPU cooler due to its efficiency but it has to be paired and equipped with heatpipes and dual-fans support as these are important criterias for delivering best result. Based on these facts, Deepcool Ice Matrix 600 seems a pretty promising product; let us verify it in later chapter.

For your reference here is the exact dimension of Deepcool Ice Matrix 600 and with the height of 160mm (140 x 73.5 x 169.5 mm), Deepcool Ice Matrix 600 might not compatible with those slim chassis; have to beware of it. The total weight of Deepcool Ice Matrix 600 with the bundled 140mm cooling fan is ~ 700g; average weight for such tower CPU cooler.

Unlike other coolers, Deepcool Ice Matrix 600 comes with pretty unique fins as all these aluminum fins are having staggered edges. Such design is either used to reduce the operating noise or maximizing the heat dissipation; can't be wrong. All these aluminum fins are pretty strong in order to keep its shape in good condition.

One of the tempting features of Deepcool Ice Matrix 600 is the six 6mm heatpipes and don't be confused by the color of these heatpieps as they are copper heatpipes with nickel chromed to mitigate the corrosion effect. Anyway all these six heatpipes are twisted in a straight line when they intersect with the aluminum fins.

Deepcool Ice Matrix 600's base is made by copper material with nickel chromed as well and its surface is flatten to maximize the conduction between the cooler with the processor. A block of fins are added on top of the Deepcool Ice Matrix 600's base to enhance the heat dissipation rather than solely depend on the aluminum fins. 

If you remember most of the older version of tower CPU coolers are only come with 120mm cooling fans but today's tower CPU coolers are mostly come with 140mm cooling fans with special design. The fan holder of this 140mm cooling fan is made by rubber material so that the noise is minimized. FYI this 140mm PWM fan (controllable speed) is able to produce 71.8 CFM airflow with 17.8 ~ 26.7 dBA noise.

Installation, Testing & Performance

CPU cooler installation could be very simple or very difficult and the setup environment is the most important factor. Firstly a right back plate has to be placed on the motherboard and this is very troublesome if your chassis does not have the opening on the motherboard plate. Next step will be securing the back plate with the Hex-head nuts with some washers to protect the PCB.

Before mounting the Deepcool Ice Matrix 600 on the motherboard, a set of retention bars have to be installed on the cooler's base with thumb screws. These retention bars will have two screw holes where one of them is for LGA775 & LGA1336 while the other one is for LGA1156. This step is just a piece of cake but it has to be done prior to the fan mounting.

After that the Deepcool Ice Matrix 600 can be mounted on the motherboard with the spring screws of the retention bars. This step is pretty simple too as these spring screws can be either secured by the screw driver or by thumb; whichever is suitable with you. The final step will be mounting the 140mm cooling fan on the Deepcool Ice Matrix 600 and this step is quite complicated if you are using bare hands so it is advisable to use a long-nose pliers to do the job.

The whole installation can be done pretty fast if the installation is occurred outside the chassis and it will be worse if the chassis does not come with opening on the motherboard plate; removing motherboard and other blocking accessories is a must in order to install the back plate. Anyway this is not a real concern for Deepcool Ice Matrix 600 as this is a common issue for all kind of heavyweight CPU coolers. Overall Deepcool Ice Matrix 600 doesn't have any compatible issue with most of the chassis as long as the chassis's width is more than 160mm; from the motherboard till the side panel.

Test Bed

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E8300 @ 2.83GHz
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3/Gigabyte G31M-ES2L
Heatsink: Deepcool Ice Matrix 600
Memory: Kingston HyperX 4GB DDR2 8500
Hard Drive: 250GB 7200RPM 8MB Seagate 
Graphic Card: Galaxy GeForce GTX260+
Casing: In Win Maelstorm
PSU: Aerocool V12XT-800
Optical Drive: HLDS DVD RW +/-
Controller: Aerocool Touch 2000
Monitor: Dell 22" Wide Screen LCD
Speaker: Edifier R501
Mouse: SteelSeries Ikari Laser
Mouse Pad: SteelSeries QcK+
HeadSet: SteelSeries 3H
Router: TRENDnet TEW-639GR
Operating System: Window XP Pro SP2/Win 7 HP
Ambient Temperature: 27 Degree Celsius

Here are the performance results of Deepcool Ice Matrix 600 after averaged out the data that we have gathered. Although Deepcool Ice Matrix 600 is a dual-fan supported CPU cooler but we only tested it out with the original setup; a single 140mm cooling fan. Based on the results that we have obtained, Deepcool Ice Matrix 600 comes with pretty decent performance although it comes with slimmer size than others. With additional cooling fan, Deepcool Ice Matrix 600 is definitely able to achieve better result. In term of nosie, Deepcool Ice Matrix 600 is neither too loud nor quiet; just average but lower noise is always welcome. If your PC is not running 24/7 and you are not sleeping right beside the PC then we don't see any problem with this Deepcool Ice Matrix 600 unless you are a very sensitive person toward those irritating noise. 

Verdicts

Being the newcomer in the consumer thermal & cooling industry, Deepcool does a good job to provide such wide range of products and some of them are even come with awesome and decent performance. The suggested retail price for Deepcool Ice Matrix 600 is around 60USD but it will be much attractive and competitive if the price is fall below than 50USD. Deepcool Ice Matrix 600 is definitely one of good choices if you are not looking for an insane cooling. However we do hope Deepcool will release a much insane cooler to fulfill those extreme enthusiasts; maybe with 8 x heatpipes, 3 x cooling fans and etc. Let us keep you posted if there is such CPU cooler from Deepcool in future.

Pros:

+ Decent performance with its size
+ Slim & neat design
+ Universal cooler
+ Attractive 140mm PWM fan
+ 6 heatpipes
+ Dual fan supported
+ Simple Installation

Cons:

- Need more competitive price

Thanks to Deepcool for providing this sample for us to review.