Thermaltake Silent Tower Cooler

Fan mounting holes are drilled on opposing sides of a fan shroud to fit 80 or 90mm fans.  This serves two purposes.  The first is you can change the fan placement to accommodate any cramped quarters within a case so things will fit in nice and neat.  The second is, provided you have room, you can add a second fan to the unit to help push air over the fins with that much more speed.

Here is a better shot of the heatpipes coming up off the base and running through the Silent Tower.  The heatpipes protrude 7mm above the top.

The fins themselves are covered on two sides by an aluminum shroud that channels the air across the fins keeping the air velocity up.

The copper base looks to be puny measuring a mere 6mm thick.  A high sheen lap job wasn't present but the base felt smooth to the touch and was clearly in the acceptable range of being uniformly flush.

Here we can see the heatpipes bending under a small plate that is held in place by four Phillips head screws that are visible on the previous picture.  The thing that always gets me about heatpipe coolers is that this superficially looks to be pretty inefficient.  Let me tell you though, it is not. 

Before we move on to installation and performance, let me try and briefly explain what a heatpipe is and what it does without oversimplifying too much.  A heatpipe is a hollow tube with a wick of sorts and some fluid inside.  The principle is simple, as the fluid at the hot point heats up, it evaporates and travels up the tube (away from your heat source) dissipating its thermal energy by convection to the cooling fins.  As this energy is dissipated, the liquid cools and begins to condensate.  The condensation then is pulled back to the evaporation point through the wick.  This cycle of evaporation and condensation repeats giving you a pretty efficient cooler.  The pipe and wick material are important as they maximize this cycle hence the copper base.  I did not cut the pipes open to inspect the wick but to my untrained eye, a wick would be a wick.

Installation

As you may have guessed, with the Thermaltake Silent Tower weighing in at an observed 723gms, mounting it is on the mainboard itself.  If your mainboard does not have the holes around the socket you are out of luck and the Silent Tower won't fit (as we unfortunately discovered when we went to test it on our K8 test bed.) 

Below, we have some pics of installation on one of our K7 test beds but installation is virtually identical for all platforms it fits.  A steel plate in the shape of an 'H' with an identically shaped foam piece directly under it give us a base in which to insert four 35mm screws from the reverse side.  With the screws through, a rubber washer and nut are screwed down locking the screws and mounting plate in place. 

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