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Thermalright’s CKV-60 cooler review

1st Impression’s:

Thermalright was kind enough to send me this cooler for my review, even without me asking for it, it’s a nice looking cooler, it’s their new model for the all copper entry level, it’s an all cooper cooler as i’ve mencioned, and it has the "Skived Fin" technology for better performance, the support for the fan is a metallic part with black colour that add’s some style to the cooler. This is an "entry" model, the finishing of the cooler is good, but i’ve seen better, it has some sligth marks on the base, and some of the last fins, the last tree, on the cooler kind of stay together and don’t get any air between then, but then again for the price and since it’s an entry model it couldn’t be as good as the top performers from this company such as the AX-7 or SLK-600/800. The clip of this cooler only clips in to one of the tree prongs in each side of the socket and needs the help of a screw driver to be clipped, but I was pleasently suprised to see that even only clipping to one of the tree prongs, it secured very well this cooler, it really did a great job securing the cooler ! The cooler was in full contact with the core of my Duron processor. This cooler also has a thick base, about 7mm, wich also helps to it’s performance.

Now let’s go over to the Technical Specs.

Technical Specs:

Heat Sink Material: Copper

Heat Sink Thermal Resistance: there isn’t an accurate way to know, since it depends on the fan being used with the heat sink, if it has more air flow: the thermal resistance will drop, if it has less air flow: the thermal resistance will rise. And as the cooler’s might be bought with diferent fan’s than the one’s we use here I won’t be using the thermal resistence as a mean for comparing or getting any conclusion about the quality of a cooler and it’s performance compared to others !

Fan Brand: Delta

Fan Model: AFB0612EH

Fan Dimensions: 60*60*25mm

Fan Voltage: 12v

Fan Speed: 7000RPM

Fan Air Flow: aproximatly 38CFM

Fan Noise: It’s a Delta 38CFM so you know what were talking about ! L

The Test

The test will be done with the following components:

Motherboard: Soltek SL75 DRV2 (with integrated cpu heat reading)

CPU: AMD Duron 650MHz overclocked to 866MHz running with extra vcore, all this so that it will produce more heat !

Thermal Paste: Silver based.

The rest: A mid tower with no extra fans, just one on the psu getting the air out, fully closed, with 2 hard drives, 1agp video card, 2pci cards, 2 cd-rom drives, plenty of cables (no round cables), this system is to try and get the most close as possible to a normal every day user system and not a fully overclockers aluminium case, filled with fans, round cables, holes and etc... So that your test results can be compared to the most users possible ! And not just by overclockers. Because here the real thing being tested is the heatsink and not the rest of the cooling stuff you might have on your case and that might be afecting your overall cooling performance ! Alias this is one of the rulles I use when testing the material, to make the system in wich I test the heatsink the most similar possible to the most users, that don’t have anything else in their computer boxes to improve the cooling of their cpu and overall system besides the fan on the psu and the cpu cooler, some other rulles are: we use the same tipe of fans for all the coolers reviewd here ! And that’s because some other sites make coolers roundups in wich cooler is tested with a fan with diferent air flow, and then they post a page with the different coolers all compared by their thermal resistence, wich of course will be different if they had used all the fans with the same air flow, as I here intend to test the quality of the heatsink for itself and not to fool the reader, I will be using fans with the same air flow ! All heatsinks, being 60mm or 80mm fan cooled will have fans in their test rated to output 38CFM ! So that the results can be compared among themselfs without fooling anyone, with this idea I have managed to compare only the quality of the heatsink for themselfs without any type of secondary artifact, since I will be using the same computer and fan system every time I review a cooler ! As I don’t use the thermal resistance of a cooler for getting my results, I will base them on two temperatures, and used them when I compare coolers, and Idle temperature, taken after the pc starts to work, but doesn’t really does nothing, and a full load temperature, obtained after running an hour and a half of the following softwares all at the same time: Prime95, SETI@Home, MusicMatch Jukebox playing a never ending playlist of mp3 and oppening several web pages, and gaming ! Do you think this is enough ?! hehehe ;)

Well now after having boored you to death, with all this testing stuff let’s see the results and conclusion’s ! :) (Bet you’re thinking: "finaly thank God !" lol)

Results and Conclusion:

Well after having tested this cooler this are the results, here are the temps:

Idle: 38ºC

Full Load: 42ºC

This is a good cooler, till the moment this is the 2nd best i’ve tested ! And for it’s price wich is low, being this an entry level cooler I can’t say you can find any better, since it his an all copper cooler, with a thick base, has the skived fin technology and comes equiped with a powerfull fan ! This is exelent combination of factors that make this a good cooler. I bet that if you lap it’s base you can get temperatures to drop another 1 or 2º C ! I will defennatly recomend this cooler to you!