by Sergey Lepilov
11/11/2008 | 03:27 PM
After a pretty long quiet time in the cooling solutions segment, Thermaltake started a massive attack to the market launching one product after another. Following the minor modifications of V1 and MaxOrb coolers that we are going to talk about in our next article, they rolled out Thermaltake Rotation (SpinQ), V14 Pro, TMG IA1; Fanless 330, Sorb and DuOrb AX VGA coolers; and an extremely interesting “Freon” system - Xpressar RCS100. However, I doubt that anyone will argue that the most long-awaited and promising cooler of all new Thermaltake solutions is the Thermaltake BigTyp 14Pro, the successor to the legendary Big Typhoon.
What is the secret of Big Typhoon’s (120, VX) success? I believe the answer is fairly simple: it is first of all the price-to-efficiency it has to offer, then its broad availability, then simple installation and no compatibility issues of any kind. There were (and are) some coolers that are more efficient than Big Typhoon, however, if you took into account the entire combination of advantages mentioned above, it was very hard to find an alternative to it. And what did Thermaltake do about it? In fact, nothing! The company rested on their laurels, counting revenues from the massive sales of this extremely successful solution and didn’t introduce any modifications (you could install a second fan and fan rotation speed controller on your own).
In the meanwhile time went on. Overclockers became more selective and new competitors with more efficient and sometimes even more affordable solutions appeared in the market. Many users were unhappy about the inconvenient retention mechanism for the first Big Typhoon revisions that used spindles. The new retention using even weaker plastic clips caused a new wave of discontent and criticism. Rough base of the cooler also was a cause for “piquing”. Moreover, the cooler was no longer an efficiency leader (which was quite logical, because more than three years have passed since the first Big Typhoon revisions came out). And finally time has come.
As far as I remember, even the very first photos of BigTyp 14Pro and news about it inspired numerous discussions of its anticipated efficiency and prospects in computer forums. Having taken only a part of the previous name, Thermaltake decided to add number 14 to it that indicated the fan type. We were among the first lucky ones who managed to get their hands on the new cooler samples and today we are going to answer most of the questions about the new cooler and help you position it among contemporary air-coolers. So let’s get started!
The newest air cooler from Thermaltake comes in a beautiful cardboard box with cut out windows in the front and back of the box revealing part of the cooler to a curious eye:
There is an air circulation scheme on the reverse side of the box. This way the manufacturer stresses that Thermaltake BigTyp 14Pro efficiently cools not only the processor, but also the area around the processor socket and even the back side of the installed graphics card.
Besides, on the box you can also find the brief description of the key features and the detailed technical specifications of this new solution:
There is a clear plastic casing inside the cardboard box that holds the cooler and a small box with accessories:
The fan on top of the cooler is covered with a plastic cap that should protect it against transportation and other damages on the way to the user.
The small cardboard box at the bottom of the plastic casing contains the following accessories:
Two retention panels for LGA775 mainboards, a swing-slip for installation onto AMD K8 and K10 mainboards, SilMORE thermal compound, screws, screw-nuts, washers, an installation manual in several languages and a warranty slip – that’s all that the new candidate for the Super Cooler title comes with.
The new solution is made in China and has $69.99 MSRP.
Thermaltake BigTyp 14Pro looks so strict and massive that you have no doubts about the seriousness of the manufacturer’s intentions:
New cooler measures 156 x 155 x 128mm and weighs 800g.
Neither size, nor weight is record-breaking according to today’s standards, so it is really pleasing that the company didn’t just primitively make it larger and heavier for the sake of improving efficiency.
So, the new cooler is built around 6 copper heatpipes 6mm in diameter that go through the copper base and pierce aluminum heatsink plates in two rows:
The whole thing is topped with a plastic casing holding a built-in 140x30mm fan:
This casing is attached to the heatsink with clips on both sides. If you remove it, you can take a real good look at the heatsink:
We see two heatsink arrays shifted away from one another, so that the whole thing could take less space. Each array consists of 69 aluminum plates, ~0.25mm thick. The gap between the plates is 1.5mm, so we assume that there should be a high-pressure fan in order to pump the air efficiently through such dense heatsink.
Each heatsink array measures 115 x 70 x 27.5mm. The calculated cooling surface of the heatsink is about 5080sq.cm. Just for your reference: Thermalright SI-128 SE has about ~6786sq.cm calculated heatsink cooling surface. In fact, it is pretty strange that Thermaltake engineers decided not to increase the heatsink cooling surface, especially since there is more than enough room at the bottom of it. Even Thermaltake Big Typhoon (120VX) has wider heatsink fins. Here I have to add that the heatpipes are soldered to the base plate.
The heatpipes lie in shaped grooves in the cooler base and the contact surfaces are all soldered together:
The thinnest part of the base below the heatpipes measures 3mm. Now the base surface is much better finished. Although it would be more correct to say that it simply became the best anyone could possibly ever make. Look:
Impeccable mirror! And it is also flawlessly even as our thermal compound imprint test showed on the glass surface as well as on the CPU heat-spreader:
The next item to discuss is the fan. Gradual transition of air-coolers to 140-mm fans is most likely inevitable. And Thermaltake BigTyp 14Pro is far not the first one here. Aerocool and Scythe have already used larger fans in their cooling solutions. However, BigTyp 14Pro has not just a plain 140-mm fan, but a fan that is 30-mm tall, as you can see from the specifications:
In fact, when we measured the diameter of the actual fan it was 129 mm and the effective blade depth was 25mm. However, this is just me nagging :) I believe I don’t have to tell you that the majority of 120 x 120 x 25 mm fans have even smaller blades. The fan rotation speed may be adjusted from ~1000 to ~1600 RPM with the noise level between 16 and 24 dBA. The maximum airflow in this case will be 85.76 CFM.
Another peculiarity of this fan is that it uses no frame. And as you may already know frameless fans have one serious issue: low static pressure. And it is true indeed: the cooler specifications claim that its fan creates 1.6 mmH2O pressure at its maximum rotation speed, which is not that much, actually. Here we have to once again mention the dense heatsink arrays, which don’t really go well with a low-pressure fan. However, let’s not speculate, as the tests later on will show if that solution works well or not.
There is a small sticker on the fan rotor. It indicated that this fan model TT-1430A was manufactured by Everflow Company well-known among overclockers for their wide range of fans:
The fan is built with a ball bearing with claimed 50,000 hours MTBF. According to the specifications, maximum fan power consumption is ~3.84 W (at 0.32 A current), although this value is different from what the sticker says: ~2.4 W (0.2 A).
The fan is connected to the three-pin plug on the mainboard and its rotation speed can be changed with a small regulator attached to the main cable:
It is not very convenient, because every time you need to increase the cooler efficiency you will have to open the system case to reach for the regulator, which is not always possible.
Summing up our discussion of the Thermaltake BigTyp 14Pro design we can’t help mentioning the highest overall assembly quality. We couldn’t find any flaws, no matter how hard we tried :)
Thermaltake BigTyp 14Pro is designed for Intel LGA775 and AMD K8 and K10 processors. For the latter platforms the cooler comes bundled with a swing-clip with a locking tab that catches on to the hooks of the standard plastic retention frame:
Socket 939/AM2 & AM2+ | LGA775 |
To install this cooler onto Intel processors you have to use four screws to fasten two steel retention panels to the base of the cooler and then put the rubber washers on them:
Then turn the cooler upside down, put the mainboard on it – making sure that heatpipes will not interfere with any mainboard components – and tighten the screw-nuts with plastic washers on the back of the mainboard PCB:
As you may remember, Cooler Master coolers are installed exactly the same way. Now we absolutely have to give Thermaltake engineers due credit for finally giving up the inconvenient and unreliable plastic spindle-clips. However, we think it would be nice if Thermaltake also provided a backplate for LGA775 mainboards, because the board bends a lot when the cooler is installed and the screws are tightened.
The cooler is very compact at the base. Heatpipes didn’t interfere with any of the heatsinks around the processor socket on our DFI LANPARTY DK X48-T2RS mainboard, although there was only 2 mm between the cooler and one of them:
Thermaltake BigTyp 14Pro doesn’t interfere with tall heat-spreaders on the memory DIMMs. Moreover, this pretty large cooler fit easily and very nicely into the system case:
However, it turned out a little hard to connect 8-pin power cable to the board as well as the power connector of our Thermaltake BigTyp 14Pro, which was right beneath the heatsink. However, you may not experience the same problems on other mainboards.
It doesn’t really matter which way the cooler is facing when it is installed into the system case (the mainboard is in vertical position). There is no mention of any preferred positioning in the installation guide. Our own experience showed that with the heatpipes in the horizontal position (parallel to the system power supply unit) the cooling efficiency improves by ~1.5°C during maximum CPU utilization compared against cooler positioning with the heatpipes facing upwards.
Thermaltake BigTyp 14Pro is equipped with three blue LEDs, so the cooler looks really nice in the dark:
They have very good lighting intensiveness: not too bright to start annoying you at some point, and not too dimmed to be unnoticed.
The table below sums up all the technical specifications of the new Thermaltake BigTyp 14Pro cooler:
Thermaltake BigTyp 14Pro is already starting to retail.
We tested the new Thermaltake BigTyp 14Pro cooler and its only competitor in two modes: in an open testbed when the mainboard sits horizontally on the desk and the cooler is installed vertically, and in a closed testbed with the mainboard in vertical position.
Our testbed was identical for all coolers and featured the following configuration:
All tests were performed under Windows Vista Ultimate Edition x86 SP1. SpeedFan 4.36 beta 15 was used to monitor the temperature of the CPU and mainboard chipset, reading it directly from the CPU core sensor and to monitor the rotation speed of the cooler fans:
The mainboard’s automatic fan speed management feature as well as CPU power-saving technologies were disabled for the time of the tests in the mainboard BIOS. The CPU thermal throttling was controlled with the RightMark CPU Clock Utility version 2.35.0:
Since we are testing only two coolers today, the CPU was heated up in three modes. First we used Linpack 32-bit with very convenient LinX shell version 0.4.9 to heat up the CPU to its maximum. We manually set the RAM capacity at 1850MB and recorded 15 runs.
Since we ran the test twice with 20/10-minute idle period between the runs for the system to cool down and temperatures to stabilize, the relatively short actual testing period was quite enough for the maximum processor temperature to become stable.
Besides that we also ran OCCT v2.0.0a CPU test for 23 minutes (with maximum priority):
Finally, the third test mode was extremely resource-hungry Unreal Tournament 3 game that works perfectly well with all four CPU cores. The test consisted of three runs of “Botmatch” scene at “DM-ShangriLa” level with the help of HardwareOC UT3 Bench v1.3.0.0 benchmark.
To minimize the dependence of the CPU performance on the graphics card in our system we used 800x600 pixels resolution but maximum image quality settings. In this mode our GeForce GTX 260 graphics card delivered average framerate of ~162 fps, which means that it is still pretty CPU-dependent.
I performed at least two cycles of tests in all three modes and waited for approximately 20 minutes for the temperature inside the system case to stabilize during each test cycle. The stabilization period in an open testbed took about half the time. Despite the stabilization period, the result of the second test cycle was usually 0.5-1°C higher. We took the average temperature of all four processor cores for the results charts, however, we will also provide the temperature readings for each core individually.
The ambient temperature was checked next to the system case with an electronic thermometer that allows monitoring the temperature changes over the past 6 hours. During our test session room temperatures varied between 23.0~23.5°C. It is used as a starting point on the temperature diagrams. Note that the fan rotation speeds as shown in the diagrams are the average readings reported by SpeedFan, and not the official claimed fan specifications.
The noise level of each cooler was measured after 1:00AM in a closed room about 20sq.m big using CENTER-321 electronic noise meter. The measurements were taken at 3cm, 1m and 3m distance from the noise source. During the acoustics tests all three 120-mm case fans were slowed down to ~700. In this mode the background noise from the system case measured at 1m distance didn’t exceed ~32.8 dBA, and the loudest fan was the 130-mm fan of the system power supply. When the system was completely powered off, our noise meter detected 30.8 dBA (the lowest on the charts is 30 dBA. The subjectively comfortable noise level is around 34~34.5 dBA.
Now a few words about the competitor. As you may have already guessed we are going to use highly efficient Thermalright SI-128 SE cooler ($40) with a 140-mm 11-blade Scythe Kaze Maru fan ($20) working in two modes: quiet mode at ~1020 RPM and maximum rotation speed for the fan of this type of ~1860 RPM:
Thermalright SI-128 SE cooler was installed with the heatpipes ends facing upwards. We didn’t modify or improve the cooler in any way (such as polish the base, for instance).
Since Scythe Kaze Maru creates higher pressure than the default fan of Thermaltake BigTyp 14Pro, we also tested the latter with the Scythe fan in the same two operational modes:
By testing the coolers with identical fans we can compare the efficiency of their heatsinks in the pure. I would also like to add here that during the tests inside a closed system case Thermaltake BigTyp 14Pro was installed exactly as you see on the photo above, i.e. with the heatpipes positioned horizontally.
As you understand, when we ran the tests using different utilities our 45nm quad-core processor overclocked differently with the cooler working in quiet mode. Here are the results:
The detailed results for both coolers are given in the table below (click to enlarge) and on the diagram. The results are grouped according to the testbed type (case or open testbed) and according to the noise level:
Click to enlarge
In fact, there is barely any difference between the two. Thermaltake BigTyp 14Pro proved as efficient as one of the best air-coolers (or maybe even THE best air-cooler). Thermalright SI-128 SE is just a little bit ahead of the competitor in OCCT burn mode and even less ahead in Linpack. However, we can say that both coolers are equally efficient with an overclocked quad-core processor.
Installing an alternative 140-mm fan onto Thermaltake BigTyp 14Pro doesn’t make any significant difference. The cooler shows ~3.5°C better result in Linpack only in quiet mode in a closed system case. In all other test modes the default fan of the Thermaltake BigTyp 14Pro yields 1°C at the most to the Scythe Kaze Maru, which may be written off to the rotation speed difference (almost 200 RPM in favor of Scythe). It is hard to tell, but if Kaze Maru had been of the same height as the default BigTyp 14Pro fan, it could have had a bigger efficiency advantage. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a 140 x 30/38 mm fan at our disposal at the time of tests.
Although there are no results for the good old Thermaltake Big Typhoon cooler (we don’t have it in our lab any more), it is fairly easy to actually compare against it. If you remember, Thermaltake have MaxOrb cooler in their product range that we compared against Big Typhoon back in the days and that fell only a little behind it. And right now we have already completed testing MaxOrb EX (the article will be coming out shortly) that proved 1-2°C more efficient than its counterpart. So, we can actually say that Thermaltake Big Typhoon and MaxOrb EX coolers are equally efficient (with a few allowances).
Now that we made this conclusion, we decided to simply add the results for MaxOrb EX into our today’s Super Cooler battle, however, the latter turned out unable to ensure the same processor frequencies as achieved with Thermaltake BigTyp 14Pro and Thermalright SI-128 SE. Once we lowered the CPU frequency to 3.65GHz and Vcore to ~1.45V, we could get our CPU with MaxOrb EX to finally pass Linpack test twice with CPU temperature at 84°C. In the same testing conditions Thermaltake BigTyp 14Pro cooled the CPU ~8°C better. In other words, the new flagship solution from Thermaltake is about 8°C more efficient than the legendary Big Typhoon.
Now let’s check out the noise levels with the original and alternative fan from Scythe:
As you see, Thermaltake BigTyp 14Pro stays within the subjective comfort zone at the minimal fan rotation speed. However, at the max speed of ~1470 RPM you will hardly be able to use it for a long time. It is interesting that despite higher rotation speed of the Scythe fan, new Thermaltake cooler works quieter with it when tested at a 1m distance, which seems to be the most practical distance. Kaze Maru has more fan blades, it rotates about 200 RPM faster in quiet mode, but still generates less noise than Thermaltake’s default fan in the plastic frame. By the way, this frame doesn’t resound in the heatsink, so it is hardly the source of the problem. I believe it is most likely the height of the fan that matters here.
Well, I can conclude with all certainty that Thermaltake BigTyp 14Pro represents one more highly efficient CPU cooling solution for overclocking needs. Yes, the new cooler is not cheap and not ultra-quiet, but it is undoubtedly efficient. It is a definite step forward from the good old Big Typhoon, but still not a jump forward, as many of you may have expected. In fact, we can hardly expect contemporary air cooling systems to reveal any revolutionary efficiency improvements.
Anyway, there is room for Thermaltake BigTyp 14Pro to improve. First of all, its heatsink effective surface could be larger and the upper and lower rows of heatpipes inside the heatsink could be shifted a bit. They could also try using a fan with side panels, i.e. framed fan, and make the heatsink plates of variable height on air flow entry. It would be good to throw in a universal backplate and LGA1366 retention kit and replace the disastrous SilMORE thermal compound with something more efficient. And most importantly may the manufacturer never forget that overclockers are ready to welcome new successful cooling solutions more often than once every three years :)
