Thermalright Ultra-120 Heatsink Review

[polobunny]

Crap a 1.4v San Diego, that's not very good for OC'ing. =/
Nice HS, rather expensive though. I'll stick with the good ol' Typhoon. :P

[RangerXLT8]

Having used XP-90, XP-90C, Zalman 7000, Zalman 7700, Zalman 9500 LED and now the Ultra-120 I can say that the Ultra-120 preformed the best for me and I think it's due to the mounting method. The heatsink takes a good amount of raw force to buckle down.

The only gripe I have witth the Ultra-120 is that it is so darn tall.

[yurimxpxman]

Yeah, it's a REALLY nice cooler. But like you guys pointed out, the fan retention wires really suck. It's not that the wires don't hold a lot of weight; it's just that they bend easily and they don't always hold very well, especially on the fan I used.

But other than the fan thing, as you can see from the benchmarks, it performed really well.

Bo did most of the work on this review (he did all of the Intel stuff). It was originally going to be my review, but Paul's absense caused a little bit of confusion and I had to send it to Bo for him to run the Intel benchmarks. Since it ended up being mostly his work, I put the article under his name instead of mine. He did a good job too :thumleft:

[RangerXLT8]

Originally Posted by yurimxpxman

Yeah, it's a REALLY nice cooler. But like you guys pointed out, the fan retention wires really suck. It's not that the wires don't hold a lot of weight; it's just that they bend easily and they don't always hold very well, especially on the fan I used.

But other than the fan thing, as you can see from the benchmarks, it performed really well.

Bo did most of the work on this review (he did all of the Intel stuff). It was originally going to be my review, but Paul's absense caused a little bit of confusion and I had to send it to Bo for him to run the Intel benchmarks. Since it ended up being mostly his work, I put the article under his name instead of mine. He did a good job too :thumleft:

Yes I did do the Intel stuff but it's still OUR(as in yours and mine) review.

[yurimxpxman]

Originally Posted by RangerXLT8

Yes I did do the Intel stuff but it's still OUR(as in yours and mine) review.

I just took another look at it, and I guess I did more than I remembered. Still, you did a good job :)

[gvblake22]

I've owned nothing but Thermalright heatsinks (minus the stock heatsink I used when I got my first computer) and I have never had a problem with the fan mounting system. I actually kindof like it. It is very light weight and easy to use and works. But then again, I've never tried it with a 120mm fan on a vertical heatsink....

And speaking of silence, I noticed that you used a Vantec Stealth fan on the Ultra-120 for testing. Those are definately not well known for their high air pressure or flow because they are so quiet, but it still yielded very good performance on that heatsink. Makes me wonder how well this cooler would do passive!

Also, Josh, what fan did you use on the Athlon 64 testing? Was it also the Vantec Stealth? I only ask because you didn't specify and one of the pictures looks like a Dynatron fan, not the Stealth.

[yurimxpxman]

Originally Posted by gvblake22

I've owned nothing but Thermalright heatsinks (minus the stock heatsink I used when I got my first computer) and I have never had a problem with the fan mounting system. I actually kindof like it. It is very light weight and easy to use and works. But then again, I've never tried it with a 120mm fan on a vertical heatsink....

The major problem with this particular fan retention system is its fan compatibility. It works, but not very well, with closed-cornered fans. Unfortunately, all I could get at the time was closed-cornered, so it was a PITA (but still worked, just not well).

Originally Posted by gvblake22

And speaking of silence, I noticed that you used a Vantec Stealth fan on the Ultra-120 for testing. Those are definately not well known for their high air pressure or flow because they are so quiet, but it still yielded very good performance on that heatsink. Makes me wonder how well this cooler would do passive!

Bo said he was running his system passively for quite some time. The Core 2 is known for not requiring a fan when paired with a good heat sink. I didn't try passive cooling on the AMD64.

Originally Posted by gvblake22

Also, Josh, what fan did you use on the Athlon 64 testing? Was it also the Vantec Stealth? I only ask because you didn't specify and one of the pictures looks like a Dynatron fan, not the Stealth.

It was a Dynex fan. (Yeah, I've never heard of them either.) I payed 5x as much as it's worth, but I had to get the review done (I didn't have any 120mm fans at hand). It spins at 2100RPM and the noise level is 38.50 dBA.

[gvblake22]

Originally Posted by yurimxpxman

The major problem with this particular fan retention system is its fan compatibility. It works, but not very well, with closed-cornered fans. Unfortunately, all I could get at the time was closed-cornered, so it was a PITA (but still worked, just not well).

THAT I can agree with. I had to use a dremel and mod the fan I had on my XP-90 for a while:

[yurimxpxman]

Originally Posted by gvblake22

THAT I can agree with. I had to use a dremel and mod the fan I had on my XP-90 for a while:

LMAO! Yeah, it's quite a nuissance. I actually thought of doing the same thing myself until I found out that I had to send it to Bo anyway :P

[polobunny]

Originally Posted by gvblake22

And speaking of silence, I noticed that you used a Vantec Stealth fan on the Ultra-120 for testing. Those are definately not well known for their high air pressure or flow because they are so quiet, but it still yielded very good performance on that heatsink. Makes me wonder how well this cooler would do passive!

This makes me think why you would like a more powerful fan or more quieter fan when you can get a Big Typhoon for the same price, or even under. I know, it's starting to be rather repetitive, but this cooler is amazing. Keeping the temps down, and the noise down too. 16DBA, and you can always control it from about every mobo to do even less, not that 16DBA is very much compared to most CPU air cooling systems. I have yet to see a cooler with better value than this. Except from it's size and the installation, this thing really dominates the air cooling market in my opinion.

Now with the Big Typhoon VX available, it's even one more good reason to get it. You can pump the fan up to 2000RPM or set it to the minimum, 1300RPM like the old typhoon.
No more motherboard removing though less compatibility and from what I heard, a slightly better finish for the copper base.