Gelid launches three-fan Black Edition heatsink
Gelid's Black Edition includes seven heatpipes - two stacked on top of five on the base - and support for three fans.
Based on a thin-fin aluminium tower design, the cooler packs three 8mm-thick heatpipes alongside 6mm heatpipes for a total of seven independent heatpipes. The result, Gelid claims, is an unprecedented ability to draw heat away from the CPU's hot-spots without sacrificing space: the cooler's thin and tall layout is designed to prevent fouling of the RAM sockets on X79 motherboards, something that users of taller RAM modules will appreciate. The layout of the heatpipes themselves is also clever: rather than spacing the pipes out in a linear fashion, five make near-direct contact with the CPU through the copper base of the heatsink while a further two pipes are soldered on top of those to provide additional cooling to the centre of the chip.
The layout of the Gelid Black Edition is interesting: like most tower coolers, the heatsink provides room to mount fans on the front and back sides in a push-pull configuration. Where the Black Edition differs from most is in the inclusion of a centre fan, sandwiched between the aluminium fins that provide cooling for the seven heatpipes. This can be used by itself to quietly cool chips with a lower thermal design profile (TDP,) or to provide a push-pull configuration without the need to find room for a fan at either side in a cramped case. For those with the room, of course, it's possible to populate all three positions with 120mm fans with Gelid providing one each of its Slim 12 PWM and Silent 12 PWM models with the heatsink, both of which - as their names suggest - support pulse-width modulated (PWM) speed control.
With overall dimensions of 109mm by 126mm and 160mm tall and a 990g weight with the supplied fans fitted, it's a pretty beefy heatsink - but, sadly, Gelid has not provided performance figures. Mounting brackets for Intel Socket 775, 1155, 1156, 1366 and 2011 and AMD AM2, AM2+, AM3, AM3+, FM1 and FM2 are included in the €59 recommended retail price (around £48 excluding taxes.)
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Discuss in the forums ReplyAgreed, I can hear the sound of creaking mobos already.
A heatsink with a back plate should be able to hold a good deal of weight as the load is spread evenly over a larger area.
Incidentally, anyone know of any horror stories of overly large tower coolers destroying motherboards? I thought my CM 212-something (one of the early ones) was heavy, but I bet it's half what this weighs. Not to mention the TRUE, as Corky42 says. Something that size I think I'd definitely go with a horizontal MB.
I even felt at that weight there was too much stress on the board with the push pins so I cobbled together the backplate and screws from a Tranquilo to bolster it.
640g gives the board of a bend without a backplate, even with that backplate I wouldn't feel comfortable using anything heavier for a long period of time. Saying that the Gelid backplate I use works well so it may be perfectly fine if they use a similar one on this cooler.
its a design with less, smaller and more silent designs that impress me.
My cooler is a bit unusual but adding more fans actually increased temperature. Compact units that can shift alot of heat would be more impressive.
Yep my TRUE copper weighs a good 2.5kg with a fan on it, but I wouldn't use it unsupported... too scary! :D
As for this new Gelid cooler, why all the hullabaloo for three fan support? The IFX-14 started this trend six years ago, and many dual tower coolers have followed suit.
Unfortunately these "cooling specialist" companies have exhausted all the novel marketing tacks and with every so-called "new" cooler comes a rehashed sales pitch, which is probably the best that can be done for essentially rehashed hardware.