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Antec Kuhler Box Performance Dual Tower 120mm Heatsink Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips

2010-07-25
this is the enttec cooler box it's part of their new line of coolers okay this is a high-performance CPU cooler it's compatible with Intel and AMD they say it is an easy install kit which we will find out in not too long from now the heatsink material is aluminum it has eight six millimeter heat pipes and I think they're describing the way that it has four heat pipes going through the base and then each side goes up four times so it's a total of eight effective heat pipes by using this duel tower design it uses a 120 millimeter pwm fan capable of spinning from 700 to 2,000 rpm and uses a four pin connector to power the fan CPU support is everything so a.m. 2 a.m. 2 plus a.m. three LGA 775 LGA 1156 and LGA 1366 with a lot of these coolers performance is so close these days it really does come down to ease of installation the weight that's being put on your CPU socket and esthetic factors other things like that the intangibles so overall I like the look of it already let's go ahead and get this out of the box I like that they've got a bit of a darker finish on the aluminum that I'm accustomed to seeing ok wow this is a lot bigger than I had thought it was based on the box I thought that the box was going to be sort of more packing material and less cooler but there's a whole lot of cooler in there so the first thing we find inside is an installation guide which is zero text it is all picture I love it it must be simple if they don't need to describe anything on it's not even as many steps as I thought the back is only two steps so we're gonna go ahead and figure out the installation a little bit later not in this video I'll be doing an installation video of it hopefully sometime this week let's have a look at the mounting hardware that we have included so first of all we have a backplate then we have a 1366 backplate on 1156 backplate and these back plates are kind of unique and that it looks like you actually just taken adhesive off you put those through the holes in the back of the motherboard and there you go so it Antec saves on materials and everybody wins you save on the pot so this particular heatsink and you don't actually lose any structural integrity here these should be just fine these are quite thick pieces of metal even though you're just using two strips on either side of the back very an innovative here's an AM two bracket here seven seven five well what is this for them now just a minute and how does this look okay well we'll figure that out in the installation guide oh these must be the top pieces so some of these are back plates some of them are top pieces and then we'll have to sort of sort that out later here's a little wrench it's very adorable some dinah Tron thermal compound and then we have two sets of thumb screws one for AMD and one for Intel so I'm gonna go ahead and assume the AMD one just uses the stock and Eve athlete and these Intel ones are threaded for the antique fabrics that are included now let's have a look at the cooler box itself you can see right here it does use a direct touch mechanism for the bottom so you're not going to be able to demonstrate that it's completely flat because that's not really the point of these but I'll do the obligatory finger shop thing anyway that everyone always contains about you know what too bad it seems to be machined quite flat there are some slight ridges between the heat pipes and the aluminum bits in between but that is to be expected they're quite shiny heat pipes I've seen shiny ones and not shiny ones I don't know that it makes any difference to cooling performance whatsoever in fact I suspect it doesn't but that doesn't really matter they've kindly labeled the airflow for you on this one so here we go let's have a look at the fins first of all the fins are what I would consider about a medium density so they're not super tight but they're also not super wide so that means that you're gonna have you're gonna have to have a fan that finds a good balance of static pressure to pure CFM in between now Antec is using what appears to be a custom fan and I don't know if you're going to be able to replace it so that could be a slight problem for people who like to replace the stock fans that are pleaded with their heatsinks although I mean depending how well this one performs there may be no need to replace it the top uses the the tower heat sinks on either side and then it uses a metal and I love to see that this is made actually I think it's metal what's metal right yeah it's metal I think that's metal it uses a metal plate on top with an antic logo I'm so nah I don't not a big fan of seeing like plastic bits all over and while they do use plastic for the fan shroud that doesn't matter to me nearly as much because when this is installed in my case it looks like this I don't really see this part but I do see the nice brushed finish that they have on that antec logo on the top and I guess there's not really too much else to say about it at this point you can see that the fan blades do stick down a little bit below where the fins of the heatsink actually reach and so I'm guessing what you're gonna get is a little bit of incidental airflow that's gonna cool these little heatsink fins down here that sit directly over the CPU and it's also gonna do a fair bit of cooling for the motherboard components that are around the CPU socket so a good example of that would be these PWM heat sinks that you'll find on our vrm PWM whatever you want to call them the voltage regulator heat sinks you find on many motherboards should receive a little bit of incidental airflow from that something that you don't get with a lot of tower heat sinks so thank you for checking out my unboxing of the enttec cooler box I'll be hoping to bring you some cooling results as well as an installation video in the next little while
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