Thermaltake Xpressar

Now that's cool!
You're probably wondering why this case has so much attention given to it - well that's because it essentially has a refrigerator inside it. While it's not going to be too good at chilling your beer (though that's always a great use for it), it is supposed to be able to keep your CPU cooler than a heatsink.

The system is filled with a special thermoconductive material (or refrigerant) that is able to be a gas and a liquid. Codenamed R-134a, the cycle starts in vapour form just before the compressor, that large cylindrical object inside the case. The compressor, um, compresses this vapour to form a saturated vapour (also known as dense), which is at a high temperature. As it passes through the condenser, the dense vapour hits the cooler surface and loses much of the heat, allowing it to become a liquid.

This liquid flows through to the Expansion Valve, which rapidly expands the liquid, and spreads it over a larger volume. The huge drop in pressure also brings the temperature down significantly, and the chilled liquid passes over the CPU where it drops the CPU temperature, absorbing a lot of the heat and changing back into mostly heated vapour. This passes through the Evaporator, which (similar to a Radiator in a watercooling loop) dissipates much of the heat, and allows the cycle to begin again.

After all this effort, you'd assume that performance would be rather awesome indeed. Instead, while it raised our hopes - with an idle temp on our QX6850 at stock of only twelve degree - it then dashed them rather fully when it crashed after overclocking. Stock settings managed to go from 12 idle to 51 load, but when overclocked this rocketed up to 32 idle and 81 load! The system crashed at this heat, and it really is a very poor effort considering the frustration of installing the fiddly mounting gear, not to mention plugging the cables inside such a crowded case.

Not only does it not cool better than even a normal heatsink, but it makes a huge amount of noise and vibration, only some of which is dampened by the solid steel case. Due to its huge weight both empty or with a system, disappointing cooling performance and loud noise, we can't really recommend this case to anyone - apart from those with more dollars than sense.