X-bit labs

Battle of the Titans: Super Coolers from Scythe, Thermaltake and Zalman Face to Face (page 18)

Category: Coolers

by Doors4ever

[ 10/21/2005 | 11:44 AM ]

Thermaltake Big Typhoon (CL-P0114)

The Thermaltake Big Typhoon cooler has been repeatedly called the best. There’s no sense in my repeating its description since it was already given in our “Titan Vanessa S & L-Type and Thermaltake Big Typhoon vs. Zalman CNPS9500 LED” review. The cooler’s numerous advantages are, however, substantially spoiled by its awful fastening.

It’s easier to mount it on K8 processors: you just have to tighten two screws with a screwdriver, holding it with a tilt – the heatsink dimensions don’t let you hold the screwdriver straight.

The installation of the cooler on other sockets is identically troublesome. First, you fasten the back-plate with long screws that go through the mainboard. Then you put the cooler on the mainboard and press it down with a bracket. It’s all right up to this moment, but now you have to screw this bracket up evenly with tiny nuts. There’s no spanner among the accessories (but the spanner won’t be very convenient as my experience with the Scythe Shogun suggests), and you can’t tighten the nuts well with your bare hands.

So, the users have to invent their own ways. I even heard a recommendation that the back-plate should be fastened with the tiny nuts, and the top bracket with the brass poles from the long screws. This is a solution, but I wonder if people at Thermaltake don’t know about this problem. If they just replaced the tiny nuts with large, ribbed ones, everything would be much easier! It would look like that:

Alas, people at Thermaltake don’t seem to care about that a bit.

The indisputable advantage of the Thermaltake Big Typhoon cooler is its quiet, almost silent fan that rotates at 1300rpm. The idle and load CPU temperatures in the thermal chamber were 46-47°C and 62-63°C respectively (don’t get worried about the short period of the idle mode – the cooler worked for long in the idle mode, but I forgot to turn on the logging at the beginning of the test).