Thermalright Archon 140mm Extreme Performance CPU Heatsink Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,402 words · ~7 min read
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So today we're going to be unboxing a pretty new product. I actually know
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nothing about this. I am going in cold on the Archon CPU cooler from
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Thermalite. So you can see it comes in their traditional brown box packaging
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because Thermal Wright's philosophy is spend money on developing the product
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and making it awesome and not on developing the box and making it
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awesome. The performance should speak for itself. We've got a Thermal Wright
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sticker included. We also have instruction guides for LGA775, 1156, and
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1366, as well as AM2, AM2 Plus, and AM3.
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And then we have a little assembly package contents listy thing. So, here
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is all of our stuff for Intel. Here's our stuff for AMD. Here's our common
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components, and some more common components, including a tool, fan clips
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for dual fans, as well as thermal compound. And I have no idea. I guess
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we'll find out. So, the first thing we find in the box
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is a thermal right fan. So, this is a 140 mm fan. All right. It has a sleeved
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cable which uses a pretty good quality sleing. It's a 4 pin PWM fan. And why
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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
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pleased with the overall quality of this fan. And I'm very, very fussy about
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fans. I'll have you guys know. Uh that's why I use uh a quadruple and a dual
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radiator in my own machine at home in order to cool a CPU and a single
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graphics card. It's all about having silent silent performance for me. So
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thermalite is obviously a pretty good choice. All right, what do we got here?
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We have accessories. So this is going to be everything that was on that little
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list. So let's go ahead and dump this out and find out what we got. Oh, and
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this is going to be the Oh, no. It was going to be the debut of my new unboxing
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knife, but instead it will just be me borrowing the Crazy Russians knife and
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uh opening this up.
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All right, cool. So, the first thing, let's talk about these. These are little
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rubber pads that you put on the corners of your fans to keep them from
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transferring vibrations to your CPU cooler. Did I mention thermal right is
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optimized for quiet performance. These
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are little rubber pieces. As far as I
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know, these have the same effect. So, I guess they're giving you two options.
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Hold on. Maybe I'm missing something here. Why don't we find out? There's
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only one way to know for sure.
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So, what are they saying those are for?
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Well, this is madness.
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I thought they were for the same thing.
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There's nothing in the instructions about it at all. Okay. Well, moving forward, I will assume they are for the
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same thing. Here's our fan clips. So, we have four wire clips to mount two fans.
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So, we can run this in pushpull. We have our included tool, which has a wrench as
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well as another more different wrench. Okay, we have our little thumb screw
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here. We have this piece. Aha, the thumb screw came out of here. So, this is the
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hold down for tightening it down right there. All right. And that's what that
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wrench is for. One of the sides. Anyway, here we have our AMD mounting hardware.
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I love Thermal Wright's mounting hardware because everything is solid. I
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mean, here, look, it's all made out of like steel. You can't you can't bend it.
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It doesn't bend. It's solid. You've got a nice thick back plate, nice thick hold
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down plate. Same goes for the Intel. You've got these nice steel back plates
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and hold down plates. That means that not only Oh, yeah. thermal compound as
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well. That means that not only is the system going to be 100% okay when it's
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sitting in one place in terms of not falling off your motherboard, but even
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you can ship thermal right coolers. Uh, at NCIX, the store where I work,
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hopefully most of you know that by now, we actually do ship a lot of systems and
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Thermalite coolers are among the best ones for shipping because even though
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they're heavy and bulky, they use an appropriate mounting system that doesn't
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rely on wussy push pins or anything like that in order to ensure that nothing bad
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happens during shipping because you got a lot of weight hanging off your socket.
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So, if you reinforce it with a good back plate and a solid hold down, that's
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going to go a long way towards having it not fall off. So, this thing is
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monstrous. Look at this. Okay. Well, we'll do the obligatory finger shot,
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which you can see is just completely a
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mirror finish. So, I'm just going to have a quick look. This is a convex
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base. I can tell from uh looking at my reflection back at me, which means that
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the very middle of it is slightly higher than the outsides. And so combined with
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their high-pressure mounting system which you can see right here that gives
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you optimal contact with the CPU directly over the die under the heat
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spreader where all of the heat is being produced. So that is why they've gone
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with that particular design characteristic of the Archon heatsink.
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Now this is clearly a 140 mm heatsink because it's clearly bigger than a 120
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mm heatsink and it uses a whopping six
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heat pipes in a U shape. So that means you have effectively 12 heat pipes to
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transfer heat all along this heat sink.
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But one thing I also want you guys to note here is you see how there's a bit
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of a gap in the middle. That's for a very good reason because no matter what
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fan you're putting on it, most of the cooling, most of the air flow is going
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to be at the outside. So you can see right over that fan hub. So the hub is
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this part in the middle. There's no heat pipes carrying heat. And then as soon as
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we get out where the blades are going to be blowing air, we've got lots of heat
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pipes. So we've got actually dual ranks of heat pipes times three. Six heat
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pipes up up each side of the Archon cooler. The top uses kind of a matte
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finish, okay? But very very slick, very professional looking, but not very
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shiny, okay? Compared to the base, which is extremely shiny. And the heat pipes
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use sort of a semi shiny finish on them. We've also got some interesting some
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other interesting aspects here. So instead of going with a completely
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straight fin, Thermalite has actually done a couple of things. They've taken
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the fins and they've bent them like this, which is going to give you slightly more surface area and slightly
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more turbulence when you're blowing air through it. And then they've also gone
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and uh uh riged them a little bit this way. So that from my experience anyway
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and from what I've seen is able to allow you to reduce the noise slightly by
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making the air flow going through it, making the heat sink slightly more
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aerodynamic as you push the air through it. So it's a fine line because you want
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to increase turbulence to get better cooling. Remember, more turbulence is
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more cooling. If you had fins that were wavy like this throughout the whole
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thing, that would give you better cooling than straight fins or even slightly rippled fins. But you would
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really sacrifice on the noise because
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moving the air around like that makes it a lot more whooshy sounding, a lot more
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noisy. So, thank you for checking out this unboxing of the Thermalite Archon
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CPU cooler and don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings,
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guides, reviews, all kinds of great stuff.