Design and Functionality

ThermoLab BARAM CPU cooler is a classical representative of the tower heatsinks. It measures 67 x 132 x 160 mm and weighs 625g:

The first thing that immediately catches your eye is the unusual shape of the heatsink plates. Their sides are not straight, but curved. This reduces the airflow resistance, so you can use fans with low rotation speed without losing any of the cooling efficiency.

For the same exact reason the heatsink plates are shifted away from one another:

The heatsink consists of 54 plates and its effective surface measures 7580 sq.cm. Just for your reference: the recently reviewed Zalman CNPS9900 LED has a heatsink with 5402sq.cm surface, and Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme is a little bigger – its heatsink surface measures 8050sq.cm. The gap between two symmetrical heatsink plates is 4mm, and between the two closest plates – 2mm. heatsink plates are 0.45mm thick. These aluminum plates are pretty soft, can bend easily, unlike hard heatsink plates of Thermalright Ultra-120 series coolers.

The heatpipes inside ThermoLab BARAM heatsink are arranged in a very smart way, which is another indisputable peculiarity of this solution:

Five copper heatpipes 6mm in diameter pierce heatsink plates not along a single line, which we often see in other coolers, but at 13-mm distance from one another. As a result, the heat flow is distributed more evenly over the heatsink array thus improving the cooler efficiency. This is what it looks like schematically:

I believe that this is a pretty logical solution and it should definitely pay back big.