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The final cooler of the three is actually different from its Pentium 4 sibling, although it has some similar features. It is much smaller than the other two, but it is still using heatpipes. It is by far the easiest of the three to fit. However, Asus has fitted what I can only describe as a back to front retention clip.

One side looks just like a normal CPU retention clip with three holes for the hooks on the site of the cooler bracket. However, the other side has a single hole that hooks into the centre pin on the cooler bracket. All this is fairly normal stuff, but rather than moving the leaver downwards to lock the cooler in place you pull it upwards on the X-Mars, which is actually easier to do than pushing it down.

The fan is a very low rpm 80mm unit with funnel shaped sides so that the intake is bigger than the exhaust. This should allow for better air pressure to be created and thus a lower fan speed can be used. The heatsink itself consist of a copper plate to which two heatpipes and several copper fins have been soldered to. This is a pretty typical design for a higher-end cooler these days.

Sadly cooling performance isn’t as good as the other products on test, although the idle temperature of 39 degrees Celsius isn’t terrible the full load temperature of 61 degrees just can’t compete. It is by no means a terrible cooler, but it’s just not as good as the other coolers on test. Besides, at £23.01 it is fairly expensive in comparison to the Arctic Cooling while offering worse performance.

Verdict

The Asus X-Mars is better than the cooler you get with retail AMD processors, but it’s not as good as the competition.

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