CoolJag Falcon 92-AL Review

[J2T]

Introduction
While CoolJag has been around as a company since 1986, it wasn't until 1999 that they began branching into the manufacturing of electronic cooling solutions. CoolJag uses a technology called skiving to create their heatsinks. Skiving basically creates the heatsink from a solid block of material so there are not joints or solders that are less efficient at conducting heat. I have their Falcon 92-AL today to run through some tests and see how this heatsink from a relatively unkown company compares.







Packaging is straight forward and functional. A black cardboard enclosure contains the usual specs and marketing slogans and contains a cutout in the center with a clear view of the heatsink.





Packed inside is the plastic shell containing the heatsink and fan, along with a small box containing the accessories.




Accessories include a back plat, clips for AMD sockets (754 through AM2), mounting screws, small tube of thermal grease, grease spreader and instruction manual. Intel mounting hardware is preinstalled on the heatsink from the factory.





Once you expose the heatsink, you get a better feel for how massive this unit is. The fins flare up on the sides with the open face 92mm fan resting in the center.





As you can see from the side view, my unit has some bent fins despite there being no visible damage with the packaging. Other than an eye sore, this really won't affect the cooling. You can see the four heatpipes extending up from the base through the upper fin section. Also notice the base has a small heatsink mounted on it as well.




On the other side is another view of the heatpipes. The included fan is a four pin smart fan that can be controlled via the BIOS on your motherboard if it is equipped.





The base has a mirror finish though there is one section that is slightly blemished.


Install

While it seems almost all high performance heatsinks these days require you to remove the motherboard, that wasn't the main issue with installation of the Falcon 92-AL. Installing the Falcon 92-AL pretty much had me wishing for the past days of mounting heatsinks that risked cracking the cores, it was a real pain to say the least.





While the instructions said to install the backplate while the included nipples were secured to the heatsink, I found this to be impossible to install in this manner due to the space between the motherboard and heatsink. Instead I opted to install the nipples to the backplate first.





As you can see here, there is quite a large gap to be made and the mounting brackets are not very flexible at all. It took a lot of pushing and sweat to get things secured.








Once it was finaly installed the only major concern is with the size of the heatsink interfering with anything nearby. It's close to the RAM on the Gigabyte P35-DS3R, but still clears it ok.





Once installed and powered up you can see that Cooljag took a different route than the normal blue LED fans, and threw in a green one. Installation was a pain, but if performance is good we might be able to forgive this fault.

Testing

For testing I used the following system.

CPU: Intel Core2Duo E8400
MB: Gigabyte P35-DS3R
Memory: G.Skill PC28800 4GB
GPU: Biostar 9600GT
PSU: Ultra X3 1000W
HD: Western Digital 250GB SATA
DVD-Rom: LiteOn 18x DVD Burner - SATA
Case: Antec 300

And for comparison I threw in the following heatsinks.

Comparison Heatsinks:
CoolJag Falcon 92-AL
Stock Intel Cooler
Thermalright Ultima-90 w 92mm Yate Loon

For idle temps I allowed the PC to sit for 3 hours with not processes running and recorded the temperature. Load temps were achieved by running Orthos Blend for 3 hours as well. Overclocked settings were running with vcore setting of 1.32v.



As you can see the Falcon 92-AL easily outpaces the stock Intel cooler but falls short of the Thermalright Ultima 90. Results were pretty much mirrored at every level.

Conclusion

While CoolJag's Falcon 92-AL performs admirably, I just can't recommend this for an Intel based rig. While I wasn't able to test it on an AMD rig, the clipping mechanism has to be easier than the Intel. It is a large heatsink, so of course you will want to check to make sure nothing is in the way before purchasing.

Cryo Laboratory would like to thank Xoxide.com for providing the CoolJag Falcon 92-AL