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Thermalright is probably the biggest offender in the category of poor factory surface finishes, which is ironic if you consider the loyal fan-base who adore their products without question. The image below is of a brand new Thermalright Ultra 120 CPU cooler (the 120 eXtreme was pictured on the first page of this article), right out of the box. You will no doubt notice that it doesn't have a very smooth finish... which would have to be be polished before I could continue because thermal paste didn't seem to spread very well with so many tracks running across the surface.
Since Thermalright products are generally ground flat and level, albeit far from smooth, they can accommodate a wide range of application methods. Ideally my article would have been made better if I had two perfectly flat real-world surfaces to work with, but time and project needs keep me from this goal at the moment. If I didn't have the Noctua NH-U12P tied-up with another project, I would have just used it for this segment. For now I am working with the tools I have available to me, and not the tools I wish I had... so expect a rewrite at some point. |
Ummm, ok... Why the palpable disdain for Thermalright products?
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Heat-pipe Direct Touch coolers have taken the market by storm. In our recent Best CPU Cooler Performance - Q1 2008 article, all of the top-placed products were built from HDT technology. The excellent concept performs very well in practice - but it's far from perfect...
Fixing the first problem required some wet-sand paper and elbow grease (that's a metaphor for hard work, so don't go searching the web for another product). By lapping down the surface to a flat even base, you can then polish it down to minimize the grain-like finish inherent of HDT products.
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Has HDT technology truly "dethroned" the prior champ? And why make a big issue about lapping the TRUE in the prior CPU cooler roundup when you are going to turn around and suggest it's a possible fix to a known problem HDT cooler suffer from?
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There are numerous ways to improve upon the performance that any one of these products has offered, so claiming that "if you do this or that" to one product will not exactly put it ahead of another. Take for example the Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme: most enthusiast like to modify this product by lapping the surface and adding additional mounting pressure by using a washer. But to that same (unecessary) extent, you could file and polish the mating surface of any one of the Heat-pipe Direct Touch coolers and use bolt-on backplate mounting to exert the same benefit. Either way you look at it, you'll have to compare stock-for-stock or modified against modified; just like anything else.
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IMHO Benchmark reviews seems somewhat biased...
[Benchmark] Best thermal Paste application methods
04-21-08
Easy Single Nvidia GPU Folding Guide
