Thermalright ROCKS. I personally hope they never change the packaging of their coolers either. Plain brown box. No need for flash colors and marketing hype, because what's inside is so good, it doesn't need it.

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Good review but I would like to see the Enzotech Ultra-X and possibly the 3RSystem Iceage 120 added to the line up.

The Enzotech because it seems to be the closest competitor to the Ultra and is a few dollars cheaper. I also like the cooling of the board that you have with the Ultra-X style coolers. Perhaps some chipset temps could be included.

The Iceage 120 just because I think it could be interesting with the heatpipes directly on the IHS.

Thanks.

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"(unless you're going for silence and want to run fanless)"

I understand that AT's primary objective is not silencing PCs. But with that comment, I wonder how well the eXtreme perform fanless compared to the Scythe Ninja - one of the favorite at SPCR.

The Ninja is no longer the best when with all fans, but it tends to scale gracefully as slower fans are used, or no fan at all (due to wider spacing).

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I agree, they seem to have some weird fetish about saying things without wanting to substantiate them. I mean, why put out that remark if you're not going to elaborate on it with some information?

It's kind of like the Bearlake remarks earlier, about how they are surprising. I think it's a childish need to act like they know something you want to. Or stupidity. Either way, they are inappropriate and irritating.

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There's no private info about fanless operation. I didn't supply data on fanless operation because our current test bed is not well set up for fanlees, and therefore I didn't want to mislead readers with fanless performance data that is likley much poorer than you can actually achieve with the Ultra-120 eXtreme. We have explained this in every review recently of a cooler that could be used fanless.

We did test fanless operation in our review of the base Ultra-120. You can look back at those results and expect performance at least that good and probably better.

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OK, first of all, I apologize for being so rude, but ...

I think you should stop making excuses about how your test bed is set up, and set it up properly so you can test it. Not to be rude (again), but this is what you do, review items, and you should take a more serious approach to it. Read some old Byte magazines and use them as a baseline as to what technical journalism and reviews should be like. There is no reason you can't be as good, I just think you are setting the bar a little too low rather than any inherent inability. Hiding behind "we're a kiddie site and we don't review that type of stuff or that stuff in that way" doesn't sound very credible either, although it's used a lot.

Also, never assume people have read previous articles and remember everything in them, that's just basic journalism. Minimally, provide a link to that page, but expecting people to remember this was tested in a previous review when you didn't in this review is a little bit of a stretch.



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It is beyond rude to apologize while you are taking off the gloves so you can use bare knuckels. I will not apologize for not providing fanless results that are not likely valid just becuase you want them. Our current test setup was not conceived for fanless testing, and we make every effort not to make changes in test beds.

We do try to listen to readers, but review comparisons are only valid if the test bed is the same, and a change of setups requires retesting of all the components tested to that point. For that reason, we normally make test bed changes only after completing a roundup summary, since we can retest just the top performers for future comparison with tested components on the new test setup.

This is very different approach from web sites that test whatever they want without valid comparisons to other results. Reviews without comparisons are ads in our opinion.

Byte is a great name from the past, but Computer Magazines appear to be fading in the marketplace since print info ages quickly in a fast moving market like computers. What works for Byte magazine is not necessarily what works for web readers. Before you pull out the "kiddie site" criticism you might consider that AnandTech is the largest and most respected of the computer review sites, as measures by real data, not speculation.

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Are your tests run with a desktop case, i.e., the heat pipes pointing straight up? The reason I ask is that my understanding of how h-pipes work is that fluid condensate is drawn back by capillary AND gravity to the heat source(CPU). In a tower case like most use these pipes cannot use gravity (for left-cpu-right), or worse, the liquid would pool in the bottom pipe (for upper-cpu-lower) orientations. If so, without testing these situations, your results may not be valid for typical uses.

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The test environment is included in every full review, but since this was an UPDATE we tried to keep the data compact. From a recent cooler review:

"All cooling tests are run with the components mounted in a standard mid-tower case. The idle and stress temperature tests are run with the case closed and standing as it would in most home setups. We do not use auxiliary fans in the test cooling case, except for the Northbridge fan attached to the 680i for overclocking."

For these tests the Ambient room temp was measured as 22C, past tests have been 20C. This is mentioned in the review.


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I understand the economy and potential convenience of getting the all the data, for all the heatsinks, and all the CPU speed points into one graph, but maybe we're close to (or have already reached) the point of these graphs being too busy to be helpful.

Maybe breaking the data into a bar graph for each CPU speed point (that would be five graphs at this point) would make it easier to see what is going on.

Besides, more graphs means more pages, which equals more advertising space. ;-)

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