X-bit labs

Four CPU Coolers from Thermaltake Tested (page 8)

Category: Coolers

by Vasily Melnik

[ 09/05/2005 | 10:40 AM ]

When you have two angles on, you can fasten your fan. But as I looked at the rather large bottom part of the heatsink I got some apprehensions about its fitting onto the test mainboard:

The bottom angle ran into the chipset’s heatsink, making the installation of the cooler impossible. So, I decided to leave only the top angle on.

Without the bottom angle the cooler was easily mounted on the CPU socket and fastened there. I took the fan from the Big Typhoon for this test – it is the exact size and is rather quiet. As I supposed, one angle proved to be quite enough to fasten the fan:

Problems arose as I tried to put the whole construction onto the mainboard:

The Sonic Tower with a fan blocked completely the first memory slot. In my case, the memory stick could be plugged into the neighboring slot, but you may have problems installing this cooler on mainboards with a higher component density.

Besides that, note the position and the height of the chipset’s cooling system on your mainboard. The ribs of the Sonic Tower are placed rather low, creating some problems with mainboards of a less than Full ATX form-factor.