The CUD-715 comes in a small green box, and inside is the HSF itself and a small pouch of thermal paste, good enough for one or two installs.
The heatsink itself is all copper, with an aluminum outer part that is connected to the base and holds up the fan, a design somewhat similar to Thermaltake’s Volcano 7+. The heatsink is made up of a 5mm base with 24 fins, each about as thick as a playing card, and roughly 2mm apart. The bar which appears to run through the fins is not one piece; each fin has a copper cylinder on each side used as a spacer. Build quality is quite good, and certainly a lot better than I would have expected at the cooler's $15.99 price point. Socket A HSFs have definitely come a long way since the first few models for the platform.
The fan is a 70mm x 15mm unit, in a very attractive silvery finish. This is really the reason why you would get the CUD-715 model over the slightly larger CUD-725 model, which has a normal black fan. The 715’s silver fan would look very stylish on a motherboard with a silver PCB. Though the fans on both models are 4500rpm and rated at 32db/A, the fan on the 715 is slightly lower profile at 15mm in height versus 25mm on the CUD-725, and therefore it has slightly lower output at 38cfm vs. 42 CFM.
Ah yes, the all important clip design. In this case the Evercool CUD-715 did well, it has a slot to hold the screwdriver in place, (are you paying attention to this, Thermalright?) On to the testing!
