The Humble Heatsink isn’t so humble anymore. There used to be a time when a heatsink was a bare chunk of aluminum, without any fans, anodized coating, lapped surfaces, or anything resembling the metal beasts in today’s world.
The heatsink knows it’s the most important part of your computer system, so manufacturers cater to this prima dona by adorning it with flashy mirrored copper and flashy aerodynamic designs. Not only do they just look impressive in a windowed case, but they have excellent performance, and manufacturers try to best each other with fancy physics tricks.
Thermaltake knows heatsinks… whether you think their previous products are great or passé. Their decades of experience have boiled down to their latest flagship model, the ThermalTake V1 (not to be confused with Thermalright’s V1 VGA heatsink), which is not only massive, but employs every modern heatsink trick in the book. You’ll find heatpipes, mirrored bases, adjustable fans, efficient aerodynamic designs, and all-copper materials… and it looks like its technology was taken from Area 51.
Specifications
Features
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The package comes with the heatsink itself, an installation manual, and springs and clips for mounting.
The heatsink is one of the most interesting designs I’ve seen. The heatsink is laid out like a sandwich; there are two major fin groups, and sandwiched in between them is a vertial-standing fan. The fins are attached to the heatsink’s base vis four heatpipes, and the fan is mounted with a vertival-standing lever.
A rheostat has been built-in to the 92mm fan, which allows the user to modify the fan’s speed, which of course affects the fans noise (and cooling performance). The knob is attached to a long black cord. This is a great feature, but once the heatsink is mounted then the user will have to open the case to change it, so changing-on-the-fly is not a real possibility. It’s more of a set-it-and-forget it type arrangement. Most people will set it to their liking and forget about it, but if you are a LAN gamer, then you’ll want the flexibility of cranking up the performance when the room gets too hot.
Each major fin group resembles the shape of a fold-up paper fan, and is made up of many pieces of shaved copper. Each copper plate is folded and soldered at the bottom and center of each piece. The fold helps to maintain the spacing, and the soldering ensures that heat transfer is consistent.
The two fin groups are held together by a copper bridge, which has ThermalTake’s “Tt” logo stamped into it. All of this folding, jointing and riveting makes the entire heatsink feel very solid, even though it looks like it could be rather fragile and bendy.
The copper base has been lapped and polished to a near-mirror finish, which helps to increase the surface area actually in contact with the CPU. Above the copper base is an aluminum block which serves as the contact point for all the mounting hardware.
Thermaltake has taken a different approach to installation than most third-party vendors. Most vendors require that you install mounting hardware to the underside of your motherboard. While this certainly makes the installation much more reliable, many enthusiasts are not so enthusiastic about removing their motherboard to try out a new heatsink.
Thermaltake’s V1 uses the same installation method of Intel’s OEM heatsinks. There are four plastic pegs that must be inserted through mounting holes on your motherboard. Pressing down on the pins pushes prongs at the end to spring open, making it impossible to retract through the motherboard holes. The black pegs are then twisted to lock them in place. I’m personally not a fan of this type of installation method, as I’ve had a few heavy heatsinks fall off that followed this methodology. If your motherboard lays flat (as in a home theater or desktop case) then you probably shouldn’t worry.
Regardless, the heatsink feels very secure, and doesn’t appear to be going anywhere. We tested the heatsink with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor under idle and load. Temperatures were measured using the processor’s own thermal sensor (motherboard sensors are usually very inaccurate).
Test System
- Inte Core 2 Duo E6600 Processor
- Foxconn Motherboard
- 2GB A-Data Vietesta DDR2-800 Memory (reviewed here)
- Seagate Barracuda 300GB HDD
- Sony DVD-R DL Burner
- Windows Vista Ultimate (64-bit)
- Ultra m998 Case (reviewed here)
ThermalTake V1 Ultra Heatsink Performance
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One of the best air-cooled heatsinks I’ve ever tested is Zalman’s CNPS-9700 NT (reviewed here), and the ThermalTake V1 achieves the same performance. The V1 certainly does better than other heatsinks in our test platform, and totally blows Intel’s OEM heatsink away (but so does nearly any third-party heatsink).
Performance-wise the V1 is certainly on the short list of top-performing air-cooled heatsinks, which usually perform as well as low-end watercooling setups. There are a few concerns that you may want to consider. For one, the V1 is freaking tall! This cooler will not fit in a compact case, and possibly not in home theater cases. You should check the clearance in your case before purchasing this heatsink.
As mentioned before, I’m not a fan of the plastic-pin installation method, especially if the motherboard is to be mounted vertically. The advantage of this installation method is that the V1 can be installed in just a few minutes without removing your motherboard.
The V1 heatsink is raised to avoid cluttering the area around the processor, so it will clean any tall components on your motherboard. The heatsink’s fan also comes with a built-in rheostat to silence it. Turning the fan’s speed down does not affect the blue LEDs inside the fan (some cheaper lighted fans will begin to flicker when their voltage is turned down).
This heatsink was made to be proudly displayed, so you’ll be wasting its beauty if you don’t have a windowed case. The ThermalTake V1 looks great, has top-tier aircooling performance and a very modest pricetag (check prices) when compared with the Zalman 9700 NT (check prices here)
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