Performance

Before getting into my testing, I did include the C7 Cu in with our past coolers tested just to show the height differences. I normally do this to put cooling results into perspective but I ended up having to redo my testing. I don’t know if it is a firmware update or just testing in our new office, but it was clear that there was a difference in my temperature tests. So rather than include a lot of results that I didn’t trust to compare, I cut our testing down to comparing the Cryorig C7 and the C7 Cu against each other. Our past results showed that the C7 was the best performing low profile cooler, even over the newer AM4 focused Noctua NH-L9a, so I just wanted to see if the copper design would give an improvement. Don’t worry I will be working on retesting our past coolers in the new office as well so I can compare those later.

So if you are new to my testing, all of the details are listed in the previous section. Including everything about the test rig. But the short version is I do the testing using AIDA64 using the CPU diode for temperature results. I test three different AM4 CPUs that cover the range of the Ryzen lineup and I test twice, once with the fan at 100% and again with the fan set to the stock profile. I did this using the AIDA64 FPU stress test because it is the most demanding, well beyond what you will normally see in real-world use. Now, this test is so demanding a lot of the heatsinks are pushed past their limits, especially with tiny heatsinks like these. When that happens it reaches 75c and then it starts downclocking the CPU. That is why the clock speeds are included. You can see that both with the 1800X and 1600X things are being downclocked. That said there is a noticeable difference in both CPUs results with the C7 Cu. The same goes for the 1200, but with that CPU we are well below being underclocked. The difference was ¾ degrees.

Now I do all of that testing again a second time, this time using the AIDA64 CPU stress test. This I have found is a lot more realistic to what you can expect for temperatures and all of your SFF fans can calm down. The Cryorig C7 Cu handled this testing really well, both coolers did really. The Cu ran a few degrees cooler in every test, averaging out the results I found that the C7 averaged 55.33 where the C7 Cu came in at 52.16 so three degrees cooler on average. That is an impressive performance jump with the same heatsink and fan design, just with a material swap.

For my last portion of testing, I did noise testing. Given the C7 and the C7 Cu have the same fan, only in different colors, I wasn’t expecting too much of a difference and I was right. I did, however, include our other coolers in this result, these results weren’t affected by our new office and or changes in our board's temperature reading. Overall the C7 design still isn’t the quietest, it was actually one of the loudest of the coolers tested. This is where the Noctua NH-L9a really pulled ahead. So be aware that better cooling performance will come at the cost of being able to hear the fan when it is running near 100% and that happens a lot more often in SFF builds.