"Zalman's CNPS9900 Max is built with better heat conducting 'composite heatpipes,' a more robust mounting system, a larger copper base plate that is machined flat and a 130mm diameter fan. The face lift and design revisions aren't cosmetic, the CNPS9900 Max heatsink performs much better than its forerunner and offers very good low noise cooling too. Like most Zalman heatsinks, the CNPS9900 Max is based off entirely original design concepts; two radial fin arrays surrounding an inset 130mm PWM fan that draws air past one set of cooling fins before exhausting it through the second."

"The Noctua NH-C14 is a big heatsink for sure, but remarkably by orienting the fans and aluminum fin stack in a top-down direction, Noctua keep the heatsinks' height to just 130mm. That's a far cry more compact than your typical 160mm tall tower heatsink, but that hasn't made the NH-C14 into a slouch. Where Frostytech's Intel LGA775/1156 thermal test platform is concerned, the Noctua NH-C14 heatsink leads the Top 5 Heatsinks Chart. The competition is a little stiffer on the AMD front with the NH-C14 trailing the front runner by about 2.2°C."

Sunbeamtech's Twister 120 heatsink is built around three 8mm diameter copper heatpipes which are exposed at the base. The heatpipes pass through the raw aluminum fins (which have a dimpled surface texture for added measure) in a chevron shape, so fan orientation is printed on the top of the heatsink. Standing 154mm tall, the Twister heatsink weighs 631 grams and ships with two 120mm fans that operate at speeds of 2000-1000RPM.

The EKL Alpenfohn Groß Clock'ner 2010 heatsink on the test bench today is a heatpipe direct contact cooler - meaning the heatpipes are exposed at the base. The heatsink stands 155mm tall, is 125mm across, 105mm deep and weighs upwards of 718grams. Simple wire clips are used to hold a single 120mm fan in position, the non-PWM fan rotates at a fixed 1200 RPM. The heatsink is compatible with Intel socket 775/115/1156/1366 processors and AMD socket AM2/AM3 CPUs.

The Zalman ZM-MFC1 combo fan controller offers some flexibility towards semi-automatic fan management in a sleek black aluminum 5.25" bay. It accommodates one PWM fan and four 3-pin fans, enabling users to independently control the speed of each five channels with a dial rheostat. Carefully placed three-colour LEDs indicate the fan speed (low/med/high) at a glance.

Akasa's Revo heatsink is known as a Loop Thermosyphon Cooler; it functions along the same lines as a heatpipe but relies on gravity instead of capillary forces to return its 'working fluid' back to the hot side. The working fluid is what conducts heat absorbed by the heatsink, from the processor to the heat exchanger, where forced air passing over cooling fins removes it to the surrounding environment. Unlike heatpipes which typically use water under a slight vacuum for working fluid, the Revo heatsink is slightly pressurized with a fluorocarbon called R134a.

Frostytech is not going to waste your time by leaving the most important information till the very end of this review - the Nexus VCT-9000 heatsink is an interesting looking thermal solution, but it fails completely in its execution. Nexus have manufactured the VCT-9000 heatsink poorly, resulting in uneven exposed heatpipes that may not contact the processor properly. The heatsink does not perform very well as a result, so the rest is pretty much moot.

In this review Frostytech is testing Titan's new Hati TTC-NC15TZ exposed heatpipe base CPU cooler. The TTC-NC15TZ is capable of very good performance results with the supplied 120mm PWM fan operating at full speed, however that trend quickly changes direction once fan speed is brought down for quieter operation...

"Rated for heat loads of up to 200W according to the manufacturer, the Arctic Cooling Freezer 13 is a relatively compact sub-130mm tall heatsink. It's 92mm fan utilizes fluid dynamic bearings and a "low noise impeller" design, so once again Arctic Cooling is focusing on quiet... quiet... quiet... The Freezer 13 mostly delivers on the noise front but it's compact design and 92mm diameter - not 120mm diameter - fan limit thermal performance to the 'average' region according to Frostytech's reference charts, even where heatsinks of an identical height are explicitly compared. Computer enthusiasts with compact PC cases will probably like the Freezer 13 though."

Scythe's Rasetsu heatsink stands out because of a mixture of acute and obtuse isosceles triangular voids cut into the leading and trailing edges of the heatsinks aluminum fins. It's a technique Scythe label the "Trident Multi Layer Fin Structure" and the point of it is to maximize air intake volume. More on this is a moment, as it's impossible to explain clearly without accompanying photographs...

"Equipped with two fans, one above the large 122x146mm aluminum cooling fin array and the other below it, the Glacialtech Siberia heatsink packs a lot into a thermal solution that stands just 122mm tall, roughly 145mm square. Six 6mm diameter copper heatpipes support the two differently sized translucent blue fans which hang from ~45 louvered aluminum fins, giving the Glacialtech Siberia a somewhat top-heavy appearance. The heatpipes are packed closely together and covered by copper heatspreader, rather than left exposed."

The 1040 gram heatsink on the test bench today is the Coolink Corator DS, a dual tower single fan thermal solution designed for use on Intel socket 775/1156/1366 and AMD socket AM2/AM3 processors. A single 800-1700RPM 120mm PWM fan is supplied with the heatsink, nestled snugly between two 46mm wide aluminum fin towers of 30, and 40 fins, respectively.

The Deepcool Gamer Storm heatsink is a tower cooler standing over 155mm tall and weighing upwards of 1189 grams. At its heart are no fewer than six, 6mm diameter copper heatpipes and 48 aluminum fins. This is a hefty CPU cooler geared towards tackling thermal loads of up to 150W, with the minimum noise output its Beijing-based manufacturer can muster. As with DeepCool's other recent heatsinks, the Gamer Storm ships with a novel new fan that skips the whole rubber-fan-post fad and instead comes clad in a resilient layer of rubber.

The Glacialtech Igloo 5751 PWM heatsink is identical to its namesake in all ways except for the fans. Where the original Igloo 5750 PWM cooler had a matched set of 20mm thick 92mm fans running in balance with respect to airflow, the Igloo 5751 PWM Frostytech is testing today approaches things differently.

Frostytech is back with a new heatsink review - this time it's a cheap and powerful tower heatsink from Zaward called the Vapor 120.

Zaward's Vapor 120 heatsink is another in a long list of thermal solutions to feature an exposed heatpipe mounting base. The concept is simple, but we've discussed it many times on Frostytech so let's jump ahead to the Vapor 120's truly unique attribute - fin dimples. To be specific, punctured spherical dimples.