Thermalright is a relatively new company in the cooling scene, but since their first attempt was the now legendary SK-6, they already have a solid reputation to uphold. I have been sent a prototype of their upcoming CB-6L aluminium and copper cooler to review.
As with other Thermalright products, the packaging is immaculate, and fortunately the quality of the heatsink is equally impressive.
As you can see, the CB-6L is a lot shinier than any other all-aluminium cooler on the market. The reason for this is that it is plated in nickel chrome. Does this affect cooling performance at all? Not a bit! But I am sure you will agree it makes it look super cool.
The secret to the CB-6L's supposedly great cooling performance is the huge copper shim covering the entire base of the cooler. This is extremely flat, and you would have to be a dingleberry to want to lap it any flatter.
Test Setup
I opted for my usual HSF review system, an Athlon 1.4GHz, since it offers more than a challenge to most coolers. The full specs are:
- AMD Athlon 1.33GHz Processor @ 1.4GHz
- 256MB Cas 2 DDR RAM
- IBM Deskstar 60GXP 20 GB
- Asus A7A266 Mobo
- 19" Sony Multiscan GDM-400PS Monitor
- Win98
- Eclipse ATX Midi Black Case
The thermal compound used was Arctic Silver II. All temperatures were taken using a thermal probe. Idle temperature was measured by allowing Windows to boot up, and leaving the PC idle until the temperature stopped fluctuating. To measure the temperatures at full load, I used Genome @ home and allowed the CPU to run at full 100% load for 15 minutes. This was sufficient to bring the CPU to its maximum temperature under the cooler.
