Verdict: Not nearly as cool as having your own pet shark.

Sharks are one of the oldest living species on the planet, and have barely evolved at all over the millennia. Sharks also have nothing to do with CPU cooling, so it's odd that Evercool has decided to use the name for its cooler.

Instead of a fan that blows air over all the fins, the fan on the Sharks has been installed in the centre of the heatsink between two sets of fins. Not only does this restrict the airflow to the fan, but it also means that there's only room for a comparatively small 80mm fan. This fan has two speed settings, 2,000rpm or 3,500rpm, which effectively translates into reasonably quiet or noticeably loud. Evercool has also shunned the use of traditional copper heatpipes, and instead settled for cheaper aluminium heatpipes, although at least the contact plate is copper.

Officially, the Sharks doesn't support Socket AM2 motherboards, so we only tested it in our LGA775 Core 2 Quad test rig. Installing the Sharks was an unpleasant experience, as it has to be screwed through the motherboard, which requires removing it from the case. At 2,000rpm, the Sharks proved to be significantly worse than the reference Intel HSF, as the CPU ran 14ûC hotter. At 3,500rpm, the CPU ran 8ûC hotter than it did with the reference Intel HSF, which is another terrible result.

Although the Sharks is much quieter than the reference Intel HSF at its lowest fan speed, its cooling ability is worse. Unlike real sharks, which haven't needed to evolve for several million years, the Evercool Sharks will need a big redesign to make it worthy of consideration.

• Motherboards - 24th October 2008
• Gaming Headsets - 26th September 2008
• Dream PCs - 24th September 2008
• Headphones - 12th September 2008
• Media PC components - 22nd August 2008
• PSUs - 14th July 2008
• Multi-GPU graphics - 20th June 2008

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