The budget heatsink that holds nothing back.
Thermalright is the manufacturer of the most popular enthusiast heatsink right now - the ThermalRight Ultra 120 Extreme (aka the TRUE 120). The company's just created a spinoff subsidiary brand called Cogage, but in no way does spinoff mean bad. Taking all the good design ideas from the original TRUE, can the TRUE Spirit do things better?
Built in the traditional tower setup, the nickel-plated base is machined to a very flat level with faint machining marks left. It sandwiches into a large aluminium piece, with four U-shaped heatpipes sandwiched inbetween that are soldered in place for better thermal transfer. The heatpipes bend upwards into a series of aluminium fins, though the pipes are not nickel-plated as with the Thermalright version. All the fins are also much thinner, meaning that it is both lighter and has less surface area.
Mounting gear included is only for Intel's LGA1366, which means that anyone else interested will have to source the correct mounting bracket from Thermalright that's compatible with their gear. Here they've used pushpins with very cheap-feeling plastic, so for those who loathe them or remove their heatsink often we suggest looking elsewhere.
Performance-wise, though, this heatsink is bloody impressive, returning temperatures very close to the TRUE and even managing to get through our torture test at a sedate 58 degrees! The included fan can be credited for a little of this success, and while it's noisy at 63.5dBA it kept things very much under control. To top all this off the TRUE Spirit rocks in at only sixty bucks, making it not a case of "should I" but "I'm an idiot if I don't" when building a Nehalem rig.
With a great asking price, equally great performance and an easy enough mount this is a great heatsink - one that would take many spots in our Kitlog if only for the socket compatibility.
Issue: 111 | April, 2010