A 5 year old could tell you this is a stupid design. Metal -> Metal heat transfer is excellent compared to Metal -> Air. Thus you need a helluva lot of fins for a few heatpipes and they try to boost the transfer coefficient with surface area rather than conductivity. By putting a giant slab of copper in the middle of the tower, the killed the surface area of the fins without improving the cooling. I bet you could take that "central copper" out and shrink the heatsink down by the same width and you'd get the same results.

Have you guys verified if the positioning of the cooler affects its performance? If I understand correctly, the heat column technology uses some sort of phase-change process, where liquid evaporates in the hot part (near the cpu) and condenses in the cooler parts (near the fins), capturing thermal energy near the cpu and releasing it in the fins. However, for this process to function correctly, it must rely on convective movements that should be affected by gravity (lower density gas has a tendency to go up, while higher density liquid goes down). In that sense, then, the heat column should function better when it is positioned vertically, instead of the typical horizontal position inside a tower pc. Note that the same principle is applied to heat-pipes, but these are much thinner and usually have a mesh inside, making them less reliant on convection and more on capillary mass transfer, thus less affected by their position.

This product sucks. =D