Conclusion

I’ve got rather ambiguous impressions about the Titan Amanda TEC. On one hand, it is a highly efficient cooler, quiet and with good thermal grease in the box. It is highly efficient with today’s overclocked AMD processors. As for the Intel platform, I should have used a dual-core CPU and the Titan might have been a leader then. Still, I think that coolers are bought for CPUs rather than vice versa. Dual-core heaters from Intel can hardly be interesting nowadays even though they have become cheaper recently. Well, perhaps they are going to be interesting for people who have bought an Amanda TEC.

To my mind, the problem of such coolers is that the era of super-hot processors and, accordingly, of super-efficient coolers has come to an end. After the arrival of the Conroe and the upcoming transition of the Presler and CedarMill processors to the new D0 stepping, you don’t have to worry anymore about excessive heat dissipation of your central processor. CPU overclocking is now mostly limited by the potential of your system RAM and mainboard rather than by the efficiency of CPU cooling. AMD has also introduced processors with a reduced TDP (but even before that, the K8 series have dissipated less heat then Intel’s competing solutions). The old saying “better late than never” doesn’t work here. The Titan Amanda TEC arrives at the moment when its high performance is not called for.

At its price of about $90 the cooler isn’t universal and has to be replaced on you moving to another platform. Also take note of the limitations concerning the free space in your system case, the necessity to ensure good inter-case ventilation, the increased requirements to the power supply, and the lack of cooling of the near-socket space on the mainboard. Yet another small disadvantage is that the cooler requires one PCI slot for its controller card.

And still I’m sure the Titan Amanda TEC will find its customer, mostly thanks to its efficiency. A real overclocker won’t be taken aback by the mentioned difficulties.

Highs:

• High cooling performance
• Low noise level
• Efficient thermal grease

Lows:

• Compatible with either AMD or Intel platforms but not with both
• May be incompatible with some system cases
• Requires good ventilation inside the system case
• High power consumption
• Doesn’t cool mainboard components around the CPU socket