The new cooler is designed only an for LGA775 platform, that is why Thermalright AXP-140 is bundled only with an LGA775 back plate, four screw-nuts and a wrench for them, two wire clips and two silicon strips for the fans, The Chill Factor thermal interface, installation instructions and a Thermalright sticker. No fan is included with the cooler.
Only when you take Thermalright AXP-140, you realize how well the cooler is built. An extremely dense array of aluminum heat sink plates sitting solidly on the heat pipes and soldered to them promise reliability and efficiency. The cooler is based on six copper heat pipes with 6mm diameter that go through a copper base. There are 79 plates in the heat sink, each 0.32mm thick. The plates are spaced out at 1.2mm distance from one another. As a rule, heat sinks with such dense plate arrays are very sensitive to the efficiency of the installed fan and its static pressure. It may be not so evident for AXP-140, because its plates are only 25.5mm tall (and only 20mm in the center of the heat sink). Nevertheless, we are going to see how the cooling efficiency of Thermalright AXP-140 solution depends on the fan rotation speed and fan type. Here I would also like to add that the calculated heat sink effective surface area is 4782sq.mm.
We tested our today’s hero and its only competitor only in a closed system case with a side panel removed. It will allow us to emulate the most common working conditions for this cooler in tower-type system cases. And the removed side panel will minimize the dependency of the cooler efficiency on the specific system case model.
As for Thermalright AXP-140, we tested it with two types of fans. Since 140 x 140 x 25mm fans are less widely spread in the market than 120 x 120 x 25mm fans, we decided to find out how efficient AXP-140 would be with the above mentioned Enermax Magma fan at different rotation speeds. As for the 140-mm fan, we chose Scythe Kaze Maru with rotation speed adjusted in the interval from 500 to 1900RPM. The new cooler is not designed to work in passive mode (without fans), because the heat sink array is too dense, that is why we didn’t perform any tests like that.
If you value noiseless systems then you would be really interested in the results obtained at 840RPM and 1180RPM. In the first case, our quad-core processor overclocked to 3825MHz at 1.55V Vcore, which is only 25MHz short of the maximum this CPU can do in Linpack. Further tests with Thermalright AXP-140 didn’t generate any new results, although we could lower the CPU temperature by 4°C and 1°C at 1500RPM and 1860RPM respectively. So, we can state that the new Thermalright AXP-140 cooler becomes more efficient as the rotation speed of the 140-mm fan increases from 840 to 1500RPM. Speeding up the fan further doesn’t really justify the significantly increasing noise.
Other than that, Thermalright AXP-140 with a 140 x 140 x 25mm fan is the most efficient “top†cooler today. It is not just efficient for CPU cooling, it also works well for the cooling of the area and components around the processor socket, which as a rule improves the overclocking results and system stability. Reliable and simple retention for LGA775 platform protecting the PCB from bending is one of the key advantages of this solution. I should also add high efficiency at low fan rotation speed and very decent efficiency increase at fan rotation speeds up to 1500RPM. The former will be very useful for the owners of quiet (almost noiseless) systems, while the latter will come in handy for non-extreme overclockers. To cut the long story short, we found a new ideal tower cooler a few days ago, and now we have finally found a replacement for the former leader – Thermalright SI-128 SE.
