So today we're going to be unboxing a pretty new product. I actually know
nothing about this. I am going in cold on the Archon CPU cooler from
Thermalite. So you can see it comes in their traditional brown box packaging
because Thermal Wright's philosophy is spend money on developing the product
and making it awesome and not on developing the box and making it
awesome. The performance should speak for itself. We've got a Thermal Wright
sticker included. We also have instruction guides for LGA775, 1156, and
1366, as well as AM2, AM2 Plus, and AM3.
And then we have a little assembly package contents listy thing. So, here
is all of our stuff for Intel. Here's our stuff for AMD. Here's our common
components, and some more common components, including a tool, fan clips
for dual fans, as well as thermal compound. And I have no idea. I guess
we'll find out. So, the first thing we find in the box
is a thermal right fan. So, this is a 140 mm fan. All right. It has a sleeved
cable which uses a pretty good quality sleing. It's a 4 pin PWM fan. And why
don't we just kind of go ahead and take that off? I actually have one of these already. It's quite quiet. I'm really
pleased with the overall quality of this fan. And I'm very, very fussy about
fans. I'll have you guys know. Uh that's why I use uh a quadruple and a dual
radiator in my own machine at home in order to cool a CPU and a single
graphics card. It's all about having silent silent performance for me. So
thermalite is obviously a pretty good choice. All right, what do we got here?
We have accessories. So this is going to be everything that was on that little
list. So let's go ahead and dump this out and find out what we got. Oh, and
this is going to be the Oh, no. It was going to be the debut of my new unboxing
knife, but instead it will just be me borrowing the Crazy Russians knife and
uh opening this up.
All right, cool. So, the first thing, let's talk about these. These are little
rubber pads that you put on the corners of your fans to keep them from
transferring vibrations to your CPU cooler. Did I mention thermal right is
optimized for quiet performance. These
are little rubber pieces. As far as I
know, these have the same effect. So, I guess they're giving you two options.
Hold on. Maybe I'm missing something here. Why don't we find out? There's
only one way to know for sure.
So, what are they saying those are for?
Well, this is madness.
I thought they were for the same thing.
There's nothing in the instructions about it at all. Okay. Well, moving forward, I will assume they are for the
same thing. Here's our fan clips. So, we have four wire clips to mount two fans.
So, we can run this in pushpull. We have our included tool, which has a wrench as
well as another more different wrench. Okay, we have our little thumb screw
here. We have this piece. Aha, the thumb screw came out of here. So, this is the
hold down for tightening it down right there. All right. And that's what that
wrench is for. One of the sides. Anyway, here we have our AMD mounting hardware.
I love Thermal Wright's mounting hardware because everything is solid. I
mean, here, look, it's all made out of like steel. You can't you can't bend it.
It doesn't bend. It's solid. You've got a nice thick back plate, nice thick hold
down plate. Same goes for the Intel. You've got these nice steel back plates
and hold down plates. That means that not only Oh, yeah. thermal compound as
well. That means that not only is the system going to be 100% okay when it's
sitting in one place in terms of not falling off your motherboard, but even
you can ship thermal right coolers. Uh, at NCIX, the store where I work,
hopefully most of you know that by now, we actually do ship a lot of systems and
Thermalite coolers are among the best ones for shipping because even though
they're heavy and bulky, they use an appropriate mounting system that doesn't
rely on wussy push pins or anything like that in order to ensure that nothing bad
happens during shipping because you got a lot of weight hanging off your socket.
So, if you reinforce it with a good back plate and a solid hold down, that's
going to go a long way towards having it not fall off. So, this thing is
monstrous. Look at this. Okay. Well, we'll do the obligatory finger shot,
which you can see is just completely a
mirror finish. So, I'm just going to have a quick look. This is a convex
base. I can tell from uh looking at my reflection back at me, which means that
the very middle of it is slightly higher than the outsides. And so combined with
their high-pressure mounting system which you can see right here that gives
you optimal contact with the CPU directly over the die under the heat
spreader where all of the heat is being produced. So that is why they've gone
with that particular design characteristic of the Archon heatsink.
Now this is clearly a 140 mm heatsink because it's clearly bigger than a 120
mm heatsink and it uses a whopping six
heat pipes in a U shape. So that means you have effectively 12 heat pipes to
transfer heat all along this heat sink.
But one thing I also want you guys to note here is you see how there's a bit
of a gap in the middle. That's for a very good reason because no matter what
fan you're putting on it, most of the cooling, most of the air flow is going
to be at the outside. So you can see right over that fan hub. So the hub is
this part in the middle. There's no heat pipes carrying heat. And then as soon as
we get out where the blades are going to be blowing air, we've got lots of heat
pipes. So we've got actually dual ranks of heat pipes times three. Six heat
pipes up up each side of the Archon cooler. The top uses kind of a matte
finish, okay? But very very slick, very professional looking, but not very
shiny, okay? Compared to the base, which is extremely shiny. And the heat pipes
use sort of a semi shiny finish on them. We've also got some interesting some
other interesting aspects here. So instead of going with a completely
straight fin, Thermalite has actually done a couple of things. They've taken
the fins and they've bent them like this, which is going to give you slightly more surface area and slightly
more turbulence when you're blowing air through it. And then they've also gone
and uh uh riged them a little bit this way. So that from my experience anyway
and from what I've seen is able to allow you to reduce the noise slightly by
making the air flow going through it, making the heat sink slightly more
aerodynamic as you push the air through it. So it's a fine line because you want
to increase turbulence to get better cooling. Remember, more turbulence is
more cooling. If you had fins that were wavy like this throughout the whole
thing, that would give you better cooling than straight fins or even slightly rippled fins. But you would
really sacrifice on the noise because
moving the air around like that makes it a lot more whooshy sounding, a lot more
noisy. So, thank you for checking out this unboxing of the Thermalite Archon
CPU cooler and don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings,
guides, reviews, all kinds of great stuff.