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.

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?

Zalman is best known for their flower/radial finned coolers which provide amazing performance that’s still at the top of the air-cooling game despite many innovations from competitors.

The Zalman CNPS10X Flex CPU Cooler is a…tower heatsink which hopes to compete with the high end of the market. HardOCP has thoroughly tested a unit:

ZALMAN is known for its versatility. So it should come as no surprise that ZALMAN is releasing a new cooler in the spirit of that versatility, the CNPS10X Flex. It is a processor heat sink that offers the ability to mount up to two fans and thanks to the spacing of the fins allows the use of low speed fans with solid performance as well.

Low noise and great performance make it a great choice for the quiet gaming types, all three of you.

Direct heatpipe contact was something of a simple solution that showed quite a bit of a performance gain when heatsinks with the technology popped up for processors…it’s about time they brought it to video cards.

Benchmark Reviews has a look at the Xigmatek Bifrost VD1065 HDT VGA Cooler and its 5 heatpipes which will whisk away heat quickly…at least that’s the plan:

Now we are looking at the real business end of the cooler, the H.D.T. area, all the above features wont count for much unless the contact area can effectively take the heat away. The problem with heat pipes resides where the gaps between them and the aluminium are, Xigmatek have done a reasonably good job here – The area where my GPU comes into contact with the heatpipes doesn’t have any gaps. The contact area isn’t mirror polished or overly smooth bit it is ground quite fine. Some might say it needs a better finish but I have to disagree, as you will see later in the results section, this cooler performs really well despite the finish.

Impressive performance overall considering it doesn’t use an insane number of fins to do its cooling.

Arctic Cooling is best known for their silent approach to…well chip cooling. The company’s Freezer line has been a good performer on the AMD and Intel processors of the past but has so far been out of the picture on the newer sockets.

The Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Rev.2 remedies that oversight and allows you to mount it on the LGA1156 and LGA1366 sockets. Testseek Labs has a look:

Normally you expect that if a product has a higher price, than either the performance or the quality is higher. Arctic Cooling is trying to tell us otherwise with the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Rev.2.

The Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Rev.2 turns out to be a great cooler, with spectacular finishing and a performance superior to many of its competitors.

A solid choice if you’re looking to limit the amount of noise coming from your PC.

When Zalman’s radial shaped heatsinks were first launched I was a bit skeptical on how well they would perform given their distinctive shape compared to the high-end competition of the time, needless to say many of the competitors are long gone and Zalman’s designs are still one of the top choices for keeping your CPU cool.

Testseek Labs has a look at the Zalman CNPS9900A LED CPU heatsink and its ability to cool off your processors. One thing is for certain, copper fans will be happy with its looks:

The CNPS10X series introduced a new design for Zalman; the more classic tower type of CPU cooler. The CNPS9900A LED which I will take a look at today is based upon a concept which Zalman calls “Omega Heatpipe Design” from its similarities with the Greek letter Omega (Ω). That design was first introduced with the Zalman CNPS9300AT which I came in contact with a while back and which impressed me by its performance.

A great performer and quite the looker for your clear side panel, if you’re into that sort of thing.

In a world of tower heatsinks the simple way to go about things is to slap a fan on its side and be done with it, then again going with the old way of doing things would have us stuck with a simple slab of aluminum with a few fins carved out of it. Innovation is key.

The Zaward Gyre Flow CPU cooler keeps the tower design but seats the fan on top of it while directing airflow with a fancy shroud. FrostyTech has a look:

The fins are pressed over three 8mm diameter copper heatpipes, but how exactly do the fins disperse heat conducted by the heatpipes? Flipping the Gyre over reveals an exposed heatpipe base similar to a variety of Xigmatek heatsinks and two large cut-outs on either side of the aluminum fins. A large 40mm hole transects through the center of its aluminum fins and only adds to the confusion.

An interesting design choice but it does give up quite a bit of cooling surface area to the shroud.

Thermalright’s Ultra Extreme heatsink has been one of the kings of high end air-cooling for quite some time now, more than capable of handling the heat output of the latest and greatest CPUs running with a decent overclock.

HardOCP has taken a look at the newest C revision of the “TRUE” and compares it to both of the earlier versions:

We will be comparing both editions to the current crop of top performers even though the B series won’t be available for purchase any more. We have included it to show the steps Thermalright has taken when redesigning the best performing air cooler in the world…and we had already spent all the time and money on the work.

Some slight updates make a good difference in its performance making it, once again, a top-notch heatsink.

Choosing the proper heatsink to keep your processor’s temperature in check can be something of a chore given the insane number of cooling options available today which wildly range in price and performance. There are some simple rules to follow though mainly the more heatpipes the better and direct contact between the heatpipes and processor is king.

Hardware Bistro has a review of the Thermaltake Contac 29 heatsink which puts together a number of fancy cooling tricks to provide good performance all at a low price:

Although Thermaltake Contac 29 is able to support dual 120mm cooling fans but in order to keep the product cost as low as possible, only a single 120mm fan is included. TT-125 is a 12V/0.3A DC PWM fan with seven orange fan blades. The specifications of TT-125 are 29 ~ 72 CFM air flow, 800 ~ 2000 RPM fan speed and 15 ~ 33 dBA noise. The notches on the fan blades are used to increase the air flow and reduce the noise at the same time.

It’s nice to know that it supports an additional fan for those that enjoy all-out performance.