Thermaltake Frio CPU Air Cooler Review @ [H]

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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Thermaltake Frio CPU Air Cooler Review - Thermaltake's new Frio CPU heatsink uses a traditional heatpipe and fin design all built under an eye-catching facade. It comes complete with not one but two 120mm fans that will give you up to 2500 RPMs each and is rated for dissipating 220w of heat which makes it good cooling for any CPU you can put on a desktop motherboard.
 
wow, I'd get this to run it on LOW but with the clearance problem that was noted I might stick with the cogage...
 
This definately does seem like a good cooler that can do the job. However it irritates the hell out of me how these cpu cooler manufacturers who target towards enthusiasts tend to overlook the fact that it isn't cool to prevent you from being able to use all of the ram slots. It is actually pretty startling how few coolers aimed at the enthusiast market allow for this, despite that enthusiasts will likely have more memory than average computer users. If you are like me and use all of the memory slots, the pickings are slim as the Cogage, and the Noctua are really the only options. The Cogage is even better as it will allow you to even run enthusiast memory with those goofy huge heat sinks on the ram modules.
 
My advise. If you're going to spend $60 on a cooler, make it a water block. The pump and rad aren't that much more. And its not like you have to change your pump/rad very often. Air coolers just cost to much for what they give you anymore.
 
Rock&Roll said:
My advise. If you're going to spend $60 on a cooler, make it a water block. The pump and rad aren't that much more. And its not like you have to change your pump/rad very often. Air coolers just cost to much for what they give you anymore.
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Only if you dont mind draining your loop once in a while for maintenance right?

Spills? meh who cares
 
Nice review. Cooler is a tad big for my tastes. My case won't fit it and I'm not buying a new case. One of those nice little coolers like the H50 or the ECO will serve me much better than a monster tower cooler.
 
Rock&Roll said:
My advise. If you're going to spend $60 on a cooler, make it a water block. The pump and rad aren't that much more. And its not like you have to change your pump/rad very often. Air coolers just cost to much for what they give you anymore.
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A good waterblock is $60-$80. A good pump is 60. A decent rad is $90. 3 good fans for the rad (if going triple) will cost $20-40. Reservoir will cost at least 15-$20 unless going the t-line route. Probably a fan controller for the fans, too, $20-50 depending on which one. Plus not everyone has the room for a triple--most can fit a single. A good single rad like the XSPC 120 won't really blow away high-end air-cooling, and you're still looking at over $200 for everything. So it isn't as simple as that.
 
Rock&Roll said:
My advise. If you're going to spend $60 on a cooler, make it a water block. The pump and rad aren't that much more. And its not like you have to change your pump/rad very often. Air coolers just cost to much for what they give you anymore.
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No thanks, I'll take my water cooling performance from the Noctua NH-D14 and save myself the trouble of worrying about spills.
 
WAcreative said:
No thanks, I'll take my water cooling performance from the Noctua NH-D14 and save myself the trouble of worrying about spills.
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Spills are not a valid excuse bring against water cooling as they are easily preventable. A good water cooling set up will cost you much more then an air setup and require more maintenance however.
 
Not to mention the majority of us simply don't need water cooling. Lets face it, a $40 Cogage gives a Core i7 owner very good overclocking abilities. A $99 V10 or $80 Noctua NDH-14 gives you air cooling that can almost rival the better water cooling setups, and are often just as quiet as well. For those that do need water cooling, i'm starting to wonder whether you are saving any money by volting the hell out of your stuff to achieve slightly higher overclocks than obtained on air, as we have seen power draws drastically increase when aggressively over-volting stuff.
 
dara said:
Spills are not a valid excuse bring against water cooling as they are easily preventable.
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It is a valid excuse depending on the type of person. If your a numb nuts like me, accidents will always happen. No matter how careful I am, Murphy's law always catches up to me.
 
Do my eyes deceive me or do they actually have an AM3 mounting system that does not involve a basic crossbar and an orientation that would let me blow the air out the back instead of up or down? Nice!
 
That's one huge HSF! :eek:

Thanks for the review. Despite good dollar to performance ratio, I'll stick with my Thermaltake Ultra 120 Extreme for now. I see no reason to change. Doesn't mean I won't recommend it to others, though. :)
 
Kinda worthless when you can't run everything on your mobo.

Then again, kinda worthless to think Cogage when it's unavailable at many places (NewEgg for one). :(

I'm running a similar rig to the testbed, not overclocked, and given the temps at load, I wonder if I should graduate to a decent cooler, tho I think I can get better performance with a tweak or two. <_< >_>

is there a chart or spreadsheet that shows price & performance of all available coolers for the i7?

Also, aren't the i7 temp sensors accurate??
 
So, if the Megahalems is better than the TRUE
and the Noctua14 is better than the megahalems,
is this Frio better than the Noctua?

Are you sure its not just because of the Noctua paste?

Can this fit 120x38mm fans, and if not I think a smaller cooler could do better with those.
 
I always adhered to the rule that "Friends don't let friends by Thermaltake products." Maybe they are proving me wrong.
 
Borocay said:
I always adhered to the rule that "Friends don't let friends by Thermaltake products." Maybe they are proving me wrong.
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I thought the same thing myself. But their Toughpower PSUs look like the real deal. This Frio CPU cooler looks pretty decent as well. Maybe they're starting to be reputable again?
 
Tex Arcana said:
Kinda worthless when you can't run everything on your mobo.

Then again, kinda worthless to think Cogage when it's unavailable at many places (NewEgg for one). :(

I'm running a similar rig to the testbed, not overclocked, and given the temps at load, I wonder if I should graduate to a decent cooler, tho I think I can get better performance with a tweak or two. <_< >_>

is there a chart or spreadsheet that shows price & performance of all available coolers for the i7?

Also, aren't the i7 temp sensors accurate??
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I just noticed that the price of the Cogage has dropped again to $29 now. This makes me wonder whether this cooler is on its way to be discontinued. I hope not as it is perfect for people who need all their ram slots, and also don't want some monster behemoth of a cooler either.
 
Wait what? You guys patented the testing process?

Nice review by the way.
 
Rebel44 said:
Read entire article again....

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Yes I read it; I checked it again just to be sure, and there is no answer for my question, which was (in little words, so you can understand it): "ARE. THE. I7. TEMP. SENSORS. ACCURATE. ?"

:tard:
 
Compared with those sensors from Wolfdale/Yorkfield, Lynnfield/Clarkdale/Gulftown yes they're accurate.
But on HOCP they ignore CPU built-in sensors and they drill a hole in IHS and put a sensor in that hole.
 
In a picky mood this morning, but regardless this is presented in a spirit of making future evaluations more valuable.

The base of the Frio contains no major warps or irregularities that will hamper the transfer of heat to the pipes and fins. Be sure to check out your sample before installing and save yourself the troubleshooting headache should you receive a less than perfect unit.
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Please square up the base of the heatsink with the graph paper next time and make the attempt to have the lines on the base of the heatsink the point of focus. The offset makes evaluation based on the picture impossible and while I completely agree one test sample should never be used to judge an entire production run and your advice is exactly correct, there is little reason to even include that pic as it is. I also noticed in many reviews the heatsink causes the graph paper to not lay flat which gives the impression of a distored heatsink base. Consider placing a thin pane of glass over the paper and then laying the heatsink down.

It sits low enough that with our motherboard there is just no way of using that first DIMM slot. Certainly this is just one motherboard, so your experience may differ, but it is very likely that this HSF is going to limit your RAM slots.
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The Gigabytes are very popular boards so this is a huge deal and there was not a P45 or Asus board laying around you could take a quick look at and give an opinion as to the ram slots ?

Further
the Frio has such low clearance it is very possible that it interferes with motherboard components. Adding the second fan left us with just one millimeter of space between the bottom of the fan and the heat sink for the motherboard mosfets. Since we are dealing with enthusiast components it seems odd that Thermaltake would seemingly discount such an important detail.
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The testbed has the abilty to report the IOH temp in the bios (incorrectly labeled "MCH temp") , It would be enlightening to compare the effects of replacing the stock intel cooler with its 360 deg blowby providing a wash of air over the IOH and mosfets with aftermarket coolers such as this one that, apparently, could lead to increased IOH and mosfet temps due to that lack of air directly hitting the heatpipe or heatsinks for the aftermarket coolers. Nothing fancy, 5 minutes of sitting in the bios with the stock cooler and then the cooler under test and recording values. We have a fair number of poster's that do not understand the implications of removing the stock heatsink and replacing it with one that does not provide sufficient air movement to the components/heatsinks around the cpu area. (a favorite trick of mine with coolers without a 2nd fan is to bend the bottom several fins on the backside of the cooler to direct air onto the mosfet area, why manufactures do not do this is beyond me as a cool cpu is no great accomplishment if the rest of the board fries.) I am very happy this was alluded to in the review. Good show !

included fans are very powerful and are what really makes this cooler perform.
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Makes one wonder how well it would compare to a $63 Tuniq Tower 120 Extreme with it's 2000 rpm capable fan. Putting the 2500rmp fans against the TRUE's 1600 max rpm fan seems hardly a good comparison. Some more points in your data would help determine if this is really a good heatsink or just a crappy one with very loud high rpm fans strapped to it.

51dB @ 4 ft !!!

You said what needed to be said, but a little more between the lines than normal, and I am scraching my head over the 'Gold' award frankly if I bought a X58 and 12GB of memory and found what you found, the cooler would be on the way back or in the trash in about 15 seconds and it appears P55 boards would have the same issue. However you more than made the issue known and that is something I have seen other sites ignore completely.

Enjoyed the review and hopefully I will become less picky today as the coffee rush wears off.
 
I would have liked to see an apples to apples comparison with identical fans on the Cocage and TRUE 120.
 
I don't see why would anyone buy this over the TRUE Rev C, 1 degree lower and 12 db higher? No thanks. No to mention it cost more.
 
Rock&Roll said:
My advise. If you're going to spend $60 on a cooler, make it a water block. The pump and rad aren't that much more. And its not like you have to change your pump/rad very often. Air coolers just cost to much for what they give you anymore.
Click to expand...

Huh. A good waterblock alone is at least $60. A good pump and 3x120mm rad, fans, reservoir, tubing and fittings, are going to run you another $200. Watercooling has its place, but it's significantly more expensive than air cooling.

This Thermaltake air cooling solution is a really good deal because you get two fans included for that $60 pricetag. Good cooling fans cost $10-15 apiece. Too bad about the clearance, but I am impressed that it performed that much better than the TRUE and the Cogage.
 
hi!
has anyone tested the Frio on the Asus P6X58D-E with all 6 RAM slots filled?
I have above motherboard and will be filling all slots. Is this cooler incompatible for this, and if so which would you recommend in similar pricing? I have also looked into the Titan Fenrir priced 15 euros more than Frio and unavailable ATM here.
Also at Frios price (40euros) comes NOCTUA NH-U12F without fans.
 
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