Best Of Socket A Coolers
Yet another radically different looking cooler from Thermosonic Technologies. Rated for 1.5GHz AMD CPU’s and 1.13GHz Pentium III’s the ThermoEngine is built of pure Aluminium Alloy. The original ThermoEngine cooler comes with a 60×60-cooling fan producing a measly 16CFM. It really makes me wonder how this could be rated for 1.5GHz AMD’s with such a poor cooling fan. Thankfully Coolerguys have identified this and they ship the ThermoEngine with a 6500RPM Delta fan producing an incredible 42CFM. Coolerguys label this the ThermoEngine “Super-Charged”, and supercharged it is folks :).
The ThermoEngine is quite different to the other coolers we have looked at so far; a cylindrical core in the middle and heat dissipating fins protruding out of the core. It’s made out of one whole block of Aluminium Alloy and this too is very well built indeed. With a dimension of 63×63 it weighs around 260g. The Delta cooling fan comes with a 3 pin Molex connector, which fits onto the main board. It’s strange why they didn’t think of sending a 4 pin Molex connector so that the fan could be powered by the PSU in case it draws too much power off the mainboard. To be on the safe side, if you plan on buying this cooler, get a 4 pin Molex connector as well. The ThermoEngine comes with a dap of thermal compound pasted onto the base of the cooler. As with any cooler it doesn’t look as appealing as Arctic Silver. Without much hesitation we got rid of the compound and used Arctic Silver II.
Installation
The cooler comes with the usual metal clip. Thankfully the clip wasn’t too rigid and didn’t produce much pressure on the processor. To be on the safe side include a shim before the installation.
Testing
Same procedure as before was followed. Here are the results.
Conclusion
Could you ask for anything better people. The ThermoEngine performs as well as the MC370-OA. The best part is this is $10 cheaper than the MC370-OA. I’m sure these results will not be achieved if used with its default 16CFM cooler, therefore make sure you go only for the “Supercharged” version. Overall a job well done by Thermosonic tech. On designing this quite innovative cooler, and of course Coolerguys for shipping this with a high powered Delta fan. This is the first time we had ever come across a cooler made of Aluminium Alloy, and thankfully first impressions were very good.
