REVIEW Reeven Extreme Cooling Cup

Pwnography6 · May 28, 2013

Reeven Extreme Cooling Cup:

Introduction:

Late last week I got a chance to do some benching with the Japanese designed Reeven Extreme Cooling cup or Recc-01. Reeven have collaborated with cooling specialist Scythe as well as Overclock Works in their first Venture into the extreme cooling market. Having only used more expensive pots up to this point I am very interested to see what performance one can expect from a product at the opposite end of the price scale.

Packaging and Contents:

Let's start by checking out the packaging featuring a yellow and black colour scheme the box is just big enough for the enclosed items, the cardboard is also quite thick ensuring that everything arrives in one piece. Starting at the front of the box we see a picture of the Recc pot and some Reeven branding and slogan, while the left side shows the warranty info in a range of languages.

Over on the reverse side is a quick picture guide to the contents of the box as well as some broad specs while the remaining side shows of a range of branding for both Reeven and its contributors.

Before I open things I like to give them a bit of a shake just to check for loose or poorly packaged contents, but in this case everything sounds pretty solid and well packed. Once the box is cracked open we find the Reeven Recc pot held snugly in place by the thick interior cardboard packaging (Nothing worse than receiving a dented pot).

The mounting system is a bit different to other kits I’veseen but basically the same post and hold down design. Mounting hardware is made up of; Back Plate and Top hold down plate, screws for connecting the mounts to the bottom plate, spring loaded screws for winding down the top plate and a variety of 6 hex shaped posts to be used in conjunction with the socket of your choice.

Included is the usual Paperwork with instructions, parts list, warranty and some Reeven logo stickers to throw on your test bench or desk.

Lastly let's look at the "Aeroflex", this round pipe insulation looks about the right size that it could double up as a stubby holder. With a bright yellow Reeven branding up the side it looks a little bit wider than my usual insulation but is a nice inclusion in the kit. It was in perfect condition when I received it but this was after the bench session as Imalways forgetting vital pics

A look at the Pot:

Standing at 160mm x 70mm and weighing in at 900 grams the pot comes in at the lighter end of the scale, but this is what i expected with the sub $200 price range. With Aluminium body and a Plated copper base the Recc has a clean looking finish;with a quick test with a razor blade the base proves to be nice and flat.

Looking inside of the pot we can see the base consists of 18 bored holes making for a decent amount of cooling surface area. The Recc also features a pre-drilled hole for mounting the essential temperature probe.

Reeven has made sure to include a good variety of mounting hardware with the Recc which makes it compatible with a large range of CPU's.
AMD- 754 / 939 / 940 / AM2 / AM2+ / AM3 / AM3+ / FM1 /
Intel- 775 / 1155 / 1156 / 1366 / 2011 /

The installation of the Recc is fairly straight forward with it being a case of matching your socket mount holes up and screwing it all together. It can be probably be explained better in pictures. Again I took these pictures after a test mount so it has some visible Mouldable eraser markings.

Prep & Setup:

For today’s tests I will be using my usual Cooling Pot prep which consists of a standard K-Type probe and a few layers of insulation. First a layer of masking tape before applying a single even layer of armaflex insulation tape.

I would then normally use my round pipe insulation but will use the one Reeven included for today’s session. This is all wrapped together with a nice helping of Shop towel to catch moisture.

(The reason I use the masking tape first is because it makes tear downs a lot easier when you don't have to spend days ripping horrible armaflex glue of the pot.)

SETUP-

Motherboard- Asus P5QC
CPU- Pentium 4 "D" 925 (Socket 775)(Stock @ 3.0 Mhz)
GPU- XFX 8800 xxx edition
OS- Win XP

Benching & Performance:

Let me start by saying I am looking forward to further sessions with the Recc mainly because I ran into a few unrelated "hardware" errors during my first attempts with this pot. After mounting the pot and dropping temps I discovered my Pent D had a nasty cold bug I just couldn’t work around and after a few freeze and thaws my heat gun decided to die leaving me with no other options than a fast defrost and a super sketchy CPU swap.

As many benchers know this makes for a nasty session but when you live 50km's away from a Dry Ice dealer and have 5 kilos of dry ice evaporating one will make do Anyway after sitting around waiting for the pot to come back up to room temps and making sure any trace of condensation was gone I remounted a second Pent D and try again.

This time things go a lot better, booting into bios with a dry pot, letting the paste burn in at around 35'c before dropping temps to around-67. By this point I had lost a lot of DICE so my main concern was getting some results, luckily for me the Reeven pot was extremely nice to work with in bios with the Idle clocks barely putting a dent in my remaining Dry ice.

After an hour or so of mucking around I hit max clocks at 5.8MHz and a stable OC of 5.6 MHz which could have been higher but I had minimal time to tweak. When I’m benching I like to start with the faster tests first so a couple quick rounds with Ubench, SuperPi 1m, PiFast an Wbench are in order. I Fill the Recc up before running any benchmarks and was happy to find that after a few runs of each of these four quick benchmarks that the Reeven pot stayed relatively full with a max temperature of 51'c. Not bad but how would the pot hold up against a constant load on a longer test.

By this stage in testing I was running rather low on Dry Ice so I decided to go all in and try to get a run of SuperPi 32m down. During this benchmark I was refilling the pot from about the halfway mark every four to five mins give or take, which seems pretty hungry but not unmanageable. Highest temp was -51'c and the lowest at around -60'c making for a 9-10'c temperature swing. I’ve had a few long benches’ BSOD on me before from temperature swings or lazy unstable clocks but was pleased to come to the end of my Pi 32m run without either problem. I was certain the temps would rise above the -50'c mark and into the -40s so the fact that the Recc stayed below -50'c was a win in my book.

Here is a number of screenshots showing temps at various stages of my 32m run.

1 Minutes:

4 Minutes:

9 Minutes:

14 Minutes:

18 Minutes:

Results:
Admittedly compared to some of the other reviews out there this is a lot older CPU and test bed in comparison but still gives us an idea of what is possible. As the old saying goes the proofs in the pudding so here are some random quick results from my brief session with the Reeven Extreme Cooling Cup-

Max Suicide Run-

5.890 MHz

pwnography6`s CPU Frequency score: 5890.69 mhz with a Pentium 4 'D' 925

Max Stable Clocks-

5.622 Mhz

W32-

pwnography6`s wPrime - 32m score: 33sec 531ms with a Pentium 4 'D' 925

Hexus PiFast-

pwnography6`s PiFast score: 39.27 sec with a Pentium 4 'D' 925

Ubench-

pwnography6`s UCBench 2011 score: 172.4 MPT-score with a Pentium 4 'D' 925

SuperPi 1m-

pwnography6`s SuperPi - 1M score: 23sec 140ms with a Pentium 4 'D' 925

SuperPi 32m-

pwnography6`s SuperPi - 32M score: 21min 19sec 468ms with a Pentium 4 'D' 925

For the mass of the pot I can't help but think these results are pretty good especially during the shorter benchmarks and bios tweaking with it is falling behind heavier pots in the lengthy benchmark category with a slightly higher temp swing and being a bit more "hungry" on DICE.

Conclusion:

Personally I think maybe the sweet spot for this pot may just be with older hardware and perhaps on Dry Ice, I’ve seen a few LN2 users running into issues with the pot just not holding temps on newer systems, but didn't run into the problem myself on the older 775 socket.

From my time with the Extreme Cooling cup it seems a bit more manageable at around the -60 ‘c to 50’ c areas but without testing the pot at lower temps or on newer hotter CPU's this is just speculation. Reevens first attempt in sub zero cooling worked well for me today and offers performance that I feel matches the Sub $200 price range.

For someone like myself who tests very little new hardware or people not willing to risk damaging newer CPU's the Reeven Recc is great both in price and performance and is a great jumping in point for anyone wanting to give Benching a go without needing the kind of money or performance that newer hardware demands.

I would like to thank the team over at The Kool Room for supplying me with the Reeven pot for today’s quick Review
Home - The Koolroom

Packaging – 9/10
Looks – 8/10
Installation – 8/10
Performance 7/10

UPDATE-

A few hours after I finished benching I went to break down The rig and found that the remaining condensation on the pot had actually begun to cause some spot rust on the top spring loaded wind down screws. Not a good Sign but hopefully something Reeven can take note of and change in the future Models.