Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme

Massive cooling power!

Date: March 21st, 2009

Author: Chris

Today I will be reviewing the Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme heatsink. I will test it's performance with my Q6600 at stock speed, and with my Q6600 overclocked.

Here are the features & specs as per Thermalright's web site:

-Quiet & powerful cooling due to multiple heat pipes & large aluminum fin area
-Proprietary bent winglet design to minimize airflow resistance
-Heat pipes soldered to base (nickel plated) & fins for optimum heat transfer
-Dimension : L63.44 x W132 x H160.5 mm (heatsink only)
-Weight: 790g (Heatsink Only)
-Recommended Fan: All 120mm Fan

Unfortunately I didn't take any pictures but you can see how the heatsink looks like at the Termalright website -> Ultra-120 Extreme

This heatsink can be used without a fan, but even Thermaright recommends you use one. If you are using a low watt cpu and have some decent case fans running, then you can probably use this heatsink without a fan directly on it. But since I overclock my Q6600 and run it on a regular basis at 3.6Ghz I need to use some fans for sure.

What I wanted in a fan were several features, first I needed a fan that can move a lot of air when I needed it to, second it needed to be as quiet as possible at it's lowest setting, and third it needed to create some decent static pressure. After some searching I decided the best fan for me would be the Silverstone FM121. I bought 4 of these fans and installed 2 of them in my case the Antec P180 as exhaust fans one in the back and one on top of the case. The other 2 fans, I installed on the Ultra-120 in a push/pull configuration. Below is a small diagram showing the setup so you can have a better idea of what i mean.

I also lapped the bottom of the Ultra-120 to get a flat mirror finish, I did this because my Q6600 is also lapped, hence this should help get a better seal between the cpu and the heatsink.

With 4 fans pulling away heat from the ultra-120, we should get some good results here. The Silverstone FM121 is supposed to be able to spin at 800 rpm in it's lowest setting but this wasn't the case. I used the application speedfan version 4.37 to measure the speed of the fans, and the lowest reading i got from 1 of the fans was 930 rpm, and the other ones read higher at about 1025 rpm, hence i raised the lowest one to equal the other 3 and used that rpm as the lowest setting. My pc sits about 2 feet away from me, but at this speed the fans are quiet and didn't bother me at all. Now the highest setting of the fans is around 2400 rpm, but at this speed my pc sounds like a jet engine, so I didn't bother with this speed.

To measure the temperature of the cpu I used the application Core Temp version: 0.99.4. The first test is at idle, I just left the system sit on the windows desktop for 5 minutes. Then I took the average temperature recorded by core temp and posted that in the graphs. To put some load on the cpu I used the SiSoftware Sandra Lite 2009.SP2 application. I used the burn-in tool and enabled only the processor arithmetic option set to run on low priority and to use a minimum utilisation of 60%. Now the reason I don't use 100% is because I don't think anybody will be able to utilise 100% of a quad core all the time. Even while I multitask my cpu never hits 40% utilisation. Hence even at 60% I am giving the benefit of a doubt in a real world setting. I used the same procedure to post the temps as i did with the idle temps.

Below are the applications used in ALL the tests:

Applications:
Core Temp version: 0.99.4
Speedfan version 4.37
CPU-Z version 1.50

Below are the system specs used in the default clock tests:

System Specs:
Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q6600 2.4 GHZ
Thermalright Ultra-120 extreme with push/pull fans
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R rev.1, Award Bios version: F12f
Bios CPU voltage set at 1.3V
CPU-Z CPU voltage "idle" reading : 1.248V
CPU-Z CPU voltage "load" reading : 1.211V due to vdroop

I begin with the cpu at stock speeds, and as you can see from the graph below, the Ultra-120 Extreme easily cools this cpu at the stock voltage and with the fans at their lowest setting. The highest temp. is 44C hence there is no need to test the fans at higher settings. Now let us see how it does with the juice increased!