You can trace back the high end of the cooling market to precious few companies, most notably Thermalright, who went all-out in their pursuit for performance and well a bit of the design flair what with all of that fancy nickel plating they indulge in.

The Thermalright Venomous X CPU Cooler is another attempt at taking the high-end air-cooling crown for the company and it puts up some impressive numbers along the way. VortezHardware has the review:

The Venomous X can only be described by one word, and that’s “Beastly”. It is quite distinctive in design from the Ultra Extreme in that the Venomous X uses a different fin design and the arrangement of the heat pipes is more linear at the top rather than in a circular pattern. As mentioned earlier, it is a few mms narrower than the Thermolab Baram but the extra heat pipe should give it the advantage. The whole heatsink is nickel plated to protect against corrosion, enabling a much longer life span. The construction is a combination of copper for the base and aluminium for the fins, ensuring the best heat conductivity without adding on too much weight.

If you’re looking for a high end cooler for that new CPU of yours you can’t do much better.

Jamming a ton of heatpipes and cooling fins on to a CPU heatsink is an easy way to get plenty of cooling potential, unfortunately graphics cards are somewhat constrained by how much space the cooler can take up…if you want to add more expansion cards that is.

The Prolimatech MK-13 GPU Cooler somehow manages to fit in 6 heatpipes and a massive number of cooling fins to keep your graphics card’s temperatures down. PureOC has the review:

The Prolimatech MK-13 features several heatpipes, six in total, that transfer the massive amount of heat that most GPUs produce. Unlike the heatpipe direct touch technology we often see on GPU coolers where they actually touch the chip, the heatpipes here emanate from the base and then run between about 150 dissipation fins (twice I lost count and didn’t want to have a third try at it).

Yes it cools about as well as you’d imagine but you’ll have to supply your own fans if you’re planning on running one.

There are a few ways to build a tower heatsink but some are less expensive to manufacture than others and you can’t go wrong with a design that has thoroughly withstood the test of time. Then again it’d get pretty boring if we didn’t have some variety.

Thermaltake’s SpinQ VT CPU cooler sports a radial set of jagged fins around a central hub fan which should make for some interesting performance characteristics. Overclockers Club has the review:

Thermaltake’s SpinQ VT is a tower style heatsink that is circular in design with a squirrel cage style fan to blow air through the entire surface area of the cooler. Air is pulled in through the top opening and pushed through the 50 nickel plated copper fins. The base is made of both copper and aluminum with three 6mm copper heatpipes running through the base plate carrying the thermal load to the copper fin array to be dispersed by the airflow from the fan. The whole assembly is nickel plated for a clean look.

It produces some very nice results although you can’t exactly strap another fan on to it like other coolers for that increased performance potential.

While most users are content with the heatsinks that come with their graphics cards there are those that can’t stand the performance or noise or they may just need a replacement cooler for an old broken down fan. Thankfully there are plenty of third-party coolers to choose from.

The Arctic Cooling Accelero Twin Turbo Pro GPU Cooler sports 4 massive heatpipes and plenty of fin surface area as well as a pair of large fans which can keep any single GPU running cool. BayReviews has the details:

As you can see, the Accelero Twin Turbo Pro performed way better than the stock as expected. At idle the maximum temperature with the stock GPU fan was 40oC, but the Twin Turbo Pro brought it down by a whopping 11 degrees to 29oC. On load however, the stock fan kept the temperature at around 55oC compared to 32oC with the Twin Turbo Pro. That’s a very nice 23 degree improvement. Now I can keep myself from upgrading the graphics card; for a little while anyways.

While their test card certainly isn’t going to strain the cooler it’s a good example of what it can do.

The old method of jamming as many fins on heatpipes as physically possible created quite a few performance problems so companies have been moving towards newer designs that allow air to flow more freely and create greater turbulence along its way.

The Gelid Tranquillo CPU Heatsink employs wing shaped fins to spice things up and, by the looks of things, it’s quite effective. Tweaknews has the review:

The Tranquillo was very quiet throughout testing, even at its maximum speed of 1400 RPM. For a cooler that is this quiet, it posted up some respectable cooling numbers at stock processor speed and voltage. Overclocking results were less impressive, but a more powerful fan would likely improve cooling performance dramatically, at the expense of increased noise.

A quiet cooler with the capability to do much better with a more powerful fan. We’re performance potential fans ourselves.

Fan manufacturers have a number of tricks to get even more airflow out of their cooling products. It usually comes in a combination of increasing fan blade surface area or increasing the rate at which the fan’s blades rotate. We prefer the first method.

The Noctua NF-P14 FLX Case Fan comes in with a 140mm diameter but, with some fancy fan mount placing, can latch on to existing 120mm fan mounts making for some interesting possibilities. Verdis Reviews has a look:

The temperatures across the board reflect what’s on paper favouring the NF-P14 FLX by one or two degrees. Perhaps not a huge decrease but remember that just one fan was used throughout testing, fitting out a case with multiple Noctua NF-P14’s should equate to a bigger reduction in temperature.

An intriguing fan for your high air-flow needs.

Many top-tier heatsinks rely on multiple fans to get added airflow over their fins which usually translates into lower temperatures, it’s one of the many methods manufacturers are using to get even better cooling results.

Of course Noctua’s NH-D14 dual fan heatsink goes all out with serrated leading edges on their fins to create air turbulence for better performance as well as six massive heatpipes to move the heat  away from your processor quickly. ProClockers has the review:

The D14 is a massive cooler, but this is something we have seen time and time again from companies like Noctua. However, I want to stress the D14 is even bigger. With both fans (more on those later) the D14 weighs in at 1240 grams. The cooler along weighs just 900 grams. But after reviewing the Thermalright  CU TRUE no weight surprises me anymore. Yet, weight is one thing. Gross size is another. The D14 stands about six inches tall. With all the evidence in just this one paragraph the D14 should be pretty top heavy.

It also sports a bit of fan overhang, which they mention, a nice addition for getting a little airflow to those hard-to-reach MOSFETS.

As with most cooling trends the high-end heatsink manufacturers latch on to a good idea and run with it, at least on their high end products. Thankfully some of them serve a purpose more than others.

The Xigmatek Balder SD1283 puts the shiny anti-corrosive properties of nickel plating to good use. Tweaknews gives it the once-over:

I’m frankly astounded by the cooling performance of the Balder SD 1283. With one less heatpipe and a single fan, the Balder managed to stay right with its big brother, Thor’s Hammer, performancewise. It also stayed right with some very capable coolers in the comparison while keeping noise to an acceptable limit. In fact, at 1000 RPM, the Balder’s fan was very nearly silent. If I’d had another Xigmatek fan to add into the mix, I feel pretty confident that it would shave off a couple more degrees.

Impressive performance and the possibility of adding another fan is sure to be on many people’s minds.

CPU coolers have come a long way over the past few years combining a few subtle, and not so subtle, design tweaks to the mix. Of course when all of the minor changes aren’t enough you can just throw brute force at the problem.

The Noctua NH-U12P SE2 comes prepped with a pair of 120mm fans for the best possible results…outside of placing insanely high CFM fans on it. Overclockers Online has the review:

It has been a while since I reviewed the Noctua NH-U12P, a heatpipe-equipped CPU cooler that performed very well. For your reading pleasure, we will be reviewing the successor to the NH-U12P… please welcome the NH-U12P SE2. What’s different about the SE2? It is compatible with the newest sockets and includes not one, but two, NF-P12 fans.

A tiny bit of a cheat but the performance results are obvious so there’s not much to complain about now is there?

CPU coolers tend to vary in performance and quality quite a bit, what’s extremely expensive might perform a slight bit better but the cheaper option isn’t lagging behind too badly. Getting great cooling performance doesn’t have to cost you an arm and a leg.

The Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus offers up some impressive features, such as 4 direct contact heatpipes, which should do well on the latest and greatest processors. Hi Tech Legion has the review:

The Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus is an aftermarket tower cooler that offers quite a bit of versatility. The Hyper 212 Plus comes equipped with one 120mm fan, but is set up to take a second fan if you would like to take it to a push/pull configuration, and all the hardware is provided to do it. The provided mounting hardware allows for mounting in any direction in order to take care of your particular airflow needs. It is compatible with all the latest sockets including Core I7 and AM3.  I will be mounting this with bottom to top airflow and benchmarking along with two other tower coolers mounted in the same manner.

A slick cooler with some interesting performance potential once you strap a second fan to it.