The son of the king of the sea (Triton, get it?) has no power over i7.
ASUS has had an endearing quirk of naming their heatsinks after odd-sounding choices (see the Lion Square for a good example), but they are usually very good quality, and have decent performance. The Triton 81 is compatible with LGA 775, AM2 and LGA1366 so naturally we tested this heatsink with Nehalem - our i965.
This heatsink is symmetrical, and looks just like a butterfly from above. Two identical blue LED fans are framed with blue aluminium, and both push air in the one direction. Also handy is how they both join into the one 4-pin PWM connector, making it very easy to plug in. The fans made a collective noise of 68.4dBA at any point that the system was running except for just after boot, which was quite an irritating drone to have going all the time.
Fourty-four aluminium fins are sandwiched between the two 92mm fans, each cut into shape to allow airflow to escape through the sides and potentially cool the northbridge (assuming the heatsink there is tall enough). Four heatpipes pierce each fin, bent in half to provide eight paths for heat transfer, and they mate with a roughly machined nickel-coated base. We got decent temps at idle for our chip, but load in both cases is quite toasty and actually crashed when overclocked - look for something else to cool your beastly Nehalem. The good news is that while it couldn't cope with the 150W-odd of heat, it will be able to for any dual or quad core from the Core 2 series, so should be a decent choice for those.
Issue: 107 | December, 2009