Thermaltake Big Typhoon CPU Cooler Review

INSTALLATION

The installation process has to be the biggest weakness of the Big Typhoon. It is not that it is overly hard or even convoluted; it is just you never know exactly when the four mounting screws are tightened “enough” and you can damn well forget about getting even mounting pressure. All these issues are due to the fact there is no visual or even physical indicator to tell you when to stop tightening the mounting screws. To understand what we are talking about, let's start at the beginning and work towards the problem area just as you would if you were installing this wee beastie.

To install the Big Typhoon, you need to remove the motherboard from the computer case but this is fairly common for the big boys so no surprises here. In an interesting twist on it Thermaltake has not mounted the anti-static strip (or in this case full size covering) nor the foam pad to the backplate; rather, you the end user are expected to do both of these things. This is not a big deal and adds only about a minute to the installation time and the instructions are clear and concise about how one goes about doing this.


After mounting the anti-static strip and foam pad you simply mount the backplate to the back of the motherboard, thread four long screws through the backplate and motherboard, then thread a small red washer over each of the screws and tighten each screw down with a brass nut (which looks like a brass standoff except that it is hollowed out). When this is done you can then lay the motherboard back down, install some TIM onto your CPU and then gently lay the Big Typhoon into place.


When this step is accomplished one simply has to mount the top H looking bracket over the top of Big Typhoon’s base and then through the four mounting screws. Unfortunately, you are now ready to enter what we laughingly refer to as the “PITA Zone” as this is where the simple installation goes off the rails and turn it into a real train wreck. What you are now expected to do is tightened down the top H bracket by threading a large chrome nut onto each of the four screws and tighten them down.

Herein lies the problem: when you tighten the nut down as far it SHOULD go, there is still plenty of room left below it before it hits the top of the brass nut. This means trying to get each nut to exert the exact same amount of pressure comes down to how close you can “eye ball” them! In testing, temperature variances were over 10 degrees on load between what was seemingly tight enough and what really was tight enough. The best tip we can tell you is to take a look at the foam pad underneath the backplate, when this compressed to about three quarters its original width, you are pretty much finished. This is such a foolish problem which could have easily been avoided by simply making those brass nuts taller and stating in the instructions to tighten the chrome nuts until they bang into the brass ones!

Thermaltake of course is aware of this issue and when the released the Big Typhoon VX (AKA Big Typhoon 2.0) they did away with this mounting system and went with a push pin system….which brings up a whole bunch of other issues which we won’t even get into right now.

Overall when done right the first time installation should only take you 10 minutes or less. Of course, getting it right depends on a good measure of luck so you should schedule in a lot of “trial and error” time to be on the safe side.