Introduction

Recent months have seen great improvements in Thermaltake’s lines of processor coolers. Branching out from just the Volcano series, many innovative designs have been seen, like the tower coolers, and also enhanced versions of the traditional heatsink design emulating the massive Thermalright copper coolers so favored by those using performance air cooling. One of these new twists of the classic heatsink/fan design is Thermaltake’s Polo735 – let’s take a look.



The Polo735 is an all inclusive cooler that comes with an 80x80x32mm 3-bladed fan revision of the smart fan design, which can be controlled by a temperature sensor attachable to the bottom of the cpu, a 3.5” bay rheostat, a PCI slot rheostat, or which can be locked into high speed. This fan can spin at 2000-5500 RPM, with maximum airflow of 26.5cfm at lowest speed or 72.92cfm at max, which is rated to cool all Athlon processors on the market and socket 478 Pentium 4’s, including all of the new Prescotts being released on that platform. As an all copper heatsink, this cooler weighs 732g, which can cause some serious damage to your board or core if any accidents happen during installation.

The retail package of this heatsink comes with a full accoutrement of supplies to attach this to the individual chip, including a series of interchangeable parts to fit it onto all socket A/478/754/940 processors and a packet of Sil silicone thermal grease. The package also includes separate complete rheostat assemblies for the 3.5” bay and PCI slot, and a thermal sensor and thermal tape to attach it to the bottom of your CPU core.


Easy installation on all platforms


Testing

The heatsink is composed of 66 copper fins welded onto a solid copper base, which is well machined on the bottom, going along with the belief that a smoother finish will conduct more heat from the CPU core. This, paired with the beefy fan Thermaltake included, should give a fairly reasonable improvement over the mainstream cooler we will be comparing this to today, the ever popular and abundant Cooler Master X-Dream: an aluminum/copper heatsink. To keep the comparison legitimate, these tests were both conducted with a case ambient temperature of 28°C, and using the supplied Sil grease. Each setup was allowed to burn in the grease for 24 hours before any sample was taken, and separate samples were taken at each cooler’s maximum and minimum fan speed.

Test Setup
CPU	Athlon XP @ 1916Mhz – 1.7v vcore - ~83W @ Load
Mainboard	Soltek FRN-L nForce2
Cooling	* ThermalTake Polo735 * Cooler Master X-Dream
Case	Raidmax Cobra Case (2x80mm rear / 1x80mm sidepanel)

Given the high ambient temps and large amount of heat coming off of this processor it’s no surprise that the temperatures would be this high. What was surprising was the relatively small difference in performance between the two coolers, with one being a massive pure copper sink, and the other being a common aluminum heatsink with a copper core. The only real differences that can be seen are the decreased variation in the temperature rises above ambient and between idle and load. The Thermaltake stays lower, and doesn’t rise as much when processor usage increases, barely hinting that the different design does count for something.


Conclusion

In conclusion, the Thermaltake Polo735 has good design, and looks very attractive, but looks aren’t everything. For those strapped for cash, a greater decrease in temperature may be seen with more money invested in case cooling than with a HSF replacement. That being said, this would still be a good cooler to invest in for your current setup, while still leaving the future options, and allowing you to keep the same cooler if you intend to later upgrade to an Athlon 64 system, or if you own a p4 system and intend to upgrade again on the same socket 478 platform. In that respect I would strongly recommend this cooler to someone buying for now with the intentions of also using it later on a different platform. In a follow-up to this article, we’ll see how it does on an overclocked Athlon64 processor. Till then, stay tuned.

We would like to thank Thermal Take for giving us the chance to test this cooler;



//John Downing

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