Cooltek ITX30 Review

[section_title title=”Closer Look”]

Closer Look

Here is a first look at the cooler after it has been taken out of its packaging. As you can see below, the top of the heat sink is dominated by an 80mm fan which blows air down through the heat sink onto the motherboard. Looking down on the cooler you get a good look at the arrangement of the heat pipes within the fin array and where the contact plate is as well.  

Looking at the cooler from a side on angle gives a better look at the fin density of the heat sink itself. The heat sink is made up of fifty six copper fins spanning the width of the cooler with two copper heat pipes feeding the fin array from a copper contact plate. You also get a little look at the mounting for the cooler. This is attached to the cooler itself instead of being a mounting system that comes separate to the cooler and has to be attached to install. You will also notice that the ITX30 uses a very slim 80mm fan; this is to keep the overall height of the cooler at the absolute minimum. We will find out later on if this has any negative effect on performance.

Towards the top end of the cooler we can see where the heat pipes come out of the contact plate and re-enter the copper heat sink itself to transfer heat evenly throughout the heat sink. As these heat pipes are made from copper they are going to have brilliant thermal conductivity and should do a brilliant job at distributing heat throughout the heat sink. We also get a better look at the size of the fan attached to the heat sink as well as the clips that are used to hold it in place. Whilst I did not have another 80mm fan available to test on it, I would like to think that you could use a larger 80mm fan if you wanted to.

On the opposite side of the cooler we can see the terminations for the heat pipes. The heat pipes closest to the edge of the heat sink have their termination ends protruding from the heat sink itself. This will cause an issue on some of the smaller motherboards available as these termination ends will foul the four or eight pin CPU power input on the motherboard itself. Also in shot we get a little look at the PWM header which is used to power and control the speed of the fan, mainly through the CPU fan header in the motherboard itself.     Here is a look at the bottom of the heat sink itself. As you can see it is an all copper base with a raised contact area for the CPU itself. Cooltek have put their own Thermal Interface Material, TIM, on the contact area to allow quick and easy installation of the heat sink directly onto the CPU and motherboard. There are four mounting points which the screws for the mounting the cooler to the motherboard screw into. The mounting points are set at the precise height so that the contact plate makes contact with the CPU without putting too much pressure onto it.