Not much surprise here to our readers we'd bet, but the 3rd place award status of the Intel Retail Celeron CPU fan/heatsink is more deserved than it initially appears.

Manufactured by Sanyo Denki, Intel's retail fan/heatsink managed to hang up there with the big boys of this roundup until the overclocked CPU just overwhelmed it.

With the smallest heatsink in the group, and a single center mounted fan versus both the massive four-fan combos of the other competitors, we didn't expect to see much from the Intel unit as far as a recommendation goes. What we were surprised to see, (you'll see the results for yourself at the end of this article) is how well the basic $12 Intel unit performed.

For most of the tests, it was within 10 - 15% of the big guns in overall temperature suppression, and it was neck and neck with the big boys when utilizing the CPU for just basic 2D tasks under a non-overclocked environment.

Where the heavies pulled away from the Intel unit occurred both under strong CPU loads at the stock 366MHz speed, and at virtually every possible test that was performed at the overclocked 550MHz speed.

Not bad for a low cost cooler, but serious overclockers need serious firepower.