HEATSINK DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION

Where this is a backside cooler, the design and thus its construction are a little on the quirky side. The heatpipes that terminate at the top of the fairly regular looking heatsink are long and have been flattened so as to easily fit underneath the motherboard. This has been done so it does not require you to have taller standoffs. The downside to these long heatpipes is that they do make the unit a bit on the flexible, springy side. The other downside to this design is that the majority if the weight is hanging out a good distance from its mounting point. This has a tendency to put a lot of additional torque on the backplate but the backplate is very beefy and should be easily up to this task.

On first blush, the business end of the IFX-10 is nothing more than a smallish tower cooler. Its fins are approximately 20mm wide, 87mm long and the tower cooler is about 112mm high with the fin assembly taking up 72.5mm of this hight. In all there is 25 of these fins and they are very tightly space and under normal circumstance would have a fairly high static pressure, but Thermalright did take great pains to reduce this as we will get into in a moment. The upside to all these fins is that they give a very large surface area for cooling.


When you do take a good look at the end of the InfernoFX-10 you realize that this is not just a dual heatpipe tower cooler that has been miniaturized. Yes it is a smaller version of the Thermalright’s CPU cooler’s in that it has a heatpipe terminating on each end of the tower with fins going horizontally between the two; however, Thermaltake recognized the fact that a big fan wouldn’t be able to fit on it and therefore it needed to have as low a static pressure as possible. To this end the fins themselves are not flat, and in fact have a very unique and distinctive look to them. Thermalright calls this design “wild fire” and when looking down from above you can sort of see the fins edges as flames.

What these multifaceted edges do is allow different parts of the fan’s air to hit the fins at a slightly different time. Since there is no “brick wall” for the air to have to hit the fan doesn’t need to create as high a static pressure or even move as fast at it would have otherwise to push air through these tightly packed fins. This is a very subtle solution to the problem and highlight’s just how good the Thermalright engineer’s are. Most company’s engineers would have been content by saying “put a better fan on it, if you want active cooling” and ignored the problem whereas Thermalright’s engineers didn’t see a problem they saw an opportunity. This attention to detail will hopefully pay dividends when it comes to its performance.

Rather that rely on MTBF numbers, an easier and better way to get a “feel” for what the manufacturer thinks is the real length of time a product should last is too simply look at the length of warranty provided. The length of warranty has been calculated to be long enough so that customers feel secure in purchasing it BUT still short enough that it will be “out of warranty” when most fail. Taken for what its worth, the InfernoFX-10 comes with a 1 year warranty.

Overall this cooler’s design is all about finesse and everything that could be possibly done to make this a better cooler was done. Usually, when a manufacturer focuses so much attention on its efficiency and ability the ascetics of the unit suffer, luckily that is not the case with the InfernoFX-10. This unit is quirky, but it has to be quirky as it is a quirky idea; but quirky or not it definately has a style which is all its own. Whether you like the wild fire look or not you have to admit that it is not boring and will add a bit of spice to even the most exotic looking system. The downside to its good looks is that it is a real crying shame to put in a computer case that doesn’t have a window!