Thermaltake Chills HTPCs with New SlimX3 Cooler

When hearing of a new cooler, end-users, especially enthusiasts, will likely think of those large, solid arrays of countless fins and heatpipes that are meant to accompany high-end CPUs. In this case, however, the newcomer cooling solution is not an oversized, dual-fan-using beast like Corsair's A70, nor is it Scythe's shapely Yasya. Instead, Thermaltake decided to bring out a diminutive cooling module intended for use in small form-factor personal computers, mainly Home-Theater Personal Computers (HTPCs).

All CPUs are bundled with their stock cooling solutions, but, depending on the chassis of choice or how space-efficient a system is, the reference cooler may not always be easy to squeeze inside the SFF chassis. Thermaltake's SlimX3 tries to not only meet these rigorous space-efficiency requirements, but does so while enabling a strong airflow and a low level of noise, as silence is one of the areas where HTPCs must excel in order to allow multimedia playback to be truly immersive.

For consumers interested in the actual specifications of the device, the SlimX3 has an aluminum base and two 6mm copper heatpipes, which lead the heat into a fin array cooled off by an 80mm fan. This spinner can reach rotary speeds of 1,200 to 2,400 RPM and has a maximum sound output of 26.9dBA. The cooling mechanism achieves this performance while keeping the advantage of size, namely 92 x 99 x 36 mm. Finally, the cooler's weight amounts to only 180 grams.

The Thermaltake SlimX3 CPU cooler is compatible with socket LGA 775 and LGA 1156 central processing units, as long as the CPU's actual TDP (thermal design power) is of 65W at the most. Multimedia enthusiasts will be pleased to hear that, should they desire to acquire this product, they will be able to do so for a price of just 20 Euro.