[section_title title=”Closer Look”]
Closer Look
The fins on the dual towers of the FES14D are 0.4mm thick aluminium and are designed to look as well as they perform. The tower-side flow design is optimized to offer the best cooling performance possible by increasing the convection between hot and cold air according to Thermaltake. Each tower is, of course, ready to have one of the included 140mm fans mounted on it, or, you can use your own fans if that suits you better. While black and white may fit in with a lot of builds, it should come as no surprise that some may want to use their own fans, for no other reason than to colour match their own build.
One of the areas I try to pay attention to, especially on air coolers, is the top of the heatsink. More importantly, how the heat pipes protrude through the top. While companies seem to be spending a bit more time paying attention to the finer details, time and time again we have seen where they have just let the heat pipes stick out through the top and not do much with them. Thermaltake have done an OK job in this aspect, but you will notice when looking at the tops of the heat pipes, they are not uniform in shape nor size, which isn’t the end of the world, but still may rub some people the wrong way.
The FES14D features six copper u-shaped heat pipes that pass through a copper base to offer maximum heat dissipation up to 240W. While this may only be an air cooler some will say, it surely has the cooling power to offer any user a bit of room for overclocking as far as temperatures are concerned. I did all my testing with this cooler on an i7 4770K which has a TDP of 84W and the temperatures were well within the acceptable ranges.
The copper base also has a nice mirror finish to it which seems to be more and more popular these days.
The FES14D comes with two of Thermaltake’s 140mm PWM fans that feature a standard black frame with white fins. The fans are PWM enabled but also come with a low-noise cable in the box to further reduce the noise output of the fans but up to 38%.
The only issue I have with the fans is the fact that the cables are not braided. While this isn’t the biggest problem in the world, especially given the performance they have to offer, a braided cable would allow for a cleaner looking finished build overall.
