Manufacturer:Thermalright, Inc.
Price: $54.95 MSRP / $43.99 USD (Crazy PC)

This week seems to be CPU cooler week for me and the theme is heatpipes, lots of them. If your CPU cooler doesn't have heatpipes, it isn't good enough it seems. When 939 dual core CPUs started to show up with heatpipe coolers in the box, it spelled the end of traditional heatsink coolers. VGA coolers are now starting to emerge with heatpipes alongside the already plentiful CPU and Hard Drive heatpipe based coolers. One of the early adopters and more famous designers of heatpipe CPU coolers is Thermalright.



Thermalright is a name I am sure almost everyone at some time has heard of and if not then it is about time you have. The product line of Thermalright has expanded as rapidly as the size of heatsinks in recent years and now appears to have over 15 different CPU cooler models in its lineup. Mix in a few chipset and VGA coolers and you have a complete cooling family. Recently, here at O², Michael looked at the Thermalright HR-01 which appears to be the early model of what I will test today, the Ultra-120.



The Ultra-120 is another "stand-up" cooler that detours away from the design that has made Thermalright famous with the heatpipes curling back overtop of base coming perpendicular to the CPU surface. Their most recent designs, like the Ultra-120, bend the heatpipes straight up into an array of aluminum fins to do the cooling. This leaves a somewhat smaller footprint while still allowing a massive 120mm fan mount. It also eliminates that downward air movement that helps cool motherboards, PWM areas, and memory like their more traditional design of the XP-120/90 so there is some draw back. I am excited to see the difference between the Ultra-120 and an XP-120 but there is plenty more to look at before testing.