Verdict: An excellent Athlon 64 HSF, but a truly awful LGA775 HSF

We've tested several Gigabyte HSFs in the past, but none has ever impressed us, until now.The latest 3D Rocket Pro is the best cooler we've seen from Gigabyte, but there are still some serious issues. The main problem is that it's a freakish nightmare to install on an LGA775 processor, and will make you wonder why you removed the reference Intel HSF in the first place. But getting it mounted is only half the battle. It did an extremely poor job of keeping an overclocked and overvolted 3.96GHz Pentium 4e cool. Even with the fan set to an eardrum-blistering 4,000rpm the 3D Rocket Pro couldn't keep the CPU cool enough to prevent the automatic thermal protection kicking in and shutting down the CPU. We remounted it several times, but the results were the same.

However, on an Athlon 64 it's a different matter entirely. It screws into the standard AMD retention mechanism without so much as a murmur, and cooled the CPU to between 6ûC and 14ûC below the reference AMD HSF, depending on fan speed.

So while the 3D Rocket Pro is technically a universal HSF, it's so unbelievably rubbish at cooling LGA775 processors that you should only consider it if you have an Athlon 64.

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