Noctua presents three new compact CPU coolers.

Three new compact CPU coolers from Noctua.

Noctua is presenting three new coolers from the NH-U9 series. All these coolers are compact sizes with 92mm fan. With the compact size of the NH-U9 coolers there are no problem with the RAM compatibility. The cooler is small and fit in smaller PC cases.
There are two desktop models NH-U9S and NH-D9L. And the server model NH-U9X i4 3U for xeons.

The models will offer again a good cooling performance and low noise. And also 6 years warranty with MTFB rating of 150000 hours work.

The most interesting of these three coolers is the S models witch has asymmetric heat-sink. The result of this asymmetric heat sink build is that when the fan is mounted the shape of the heat sink plus fan is almost square looked from top. And the result is that the cpu cooler is keeping high surface that allow the heat to dissipate. Its avoiding situations when the fan is touching something in a limited space and this isn't coming at the price of reduced heat sink size.

Their price will be 59.90$

Black CPU coolers - 2014

Black CPU coolers

Why black CPU coolers?

Because they are "cool" :). There are plenty of good looking CPU coolers on the market. And while CPU coolers and the heat sinks are not the most important part of the PC. For sure they are the most impressive parts when its come to the view and the way they look. I decided to make small list of the current available CPU coolers grouped by color . The list will include the major brands and there will be pictures included.

Black CPU coolers list for 2014.

1. Xigmatek Dark Knight - SD1283 Night Hawk Edition.

Ximatec official web page.

Xigmatek Dark knight CPU cooler - Black Hawk Edition.

What is the special thing for this CPU cooler is the black paint on the heat sink. Actually this is special ceramic coating which Xigmatek claims to remove the heat away faster from the heat sink. Or with their own words "Special formulated ceramic coating with stealth technology for ultimate heat dispensing. This innovative composite coating is specially designed to conduct heat away from its source rapidly and dispense it extremely fast without leaving any trace on the surface."
Its true that you cant use any paint for heat sinks. Because if the paint is temperature insulator it will actually stop the heat. So OK they have use their special paint formula.

But there is also another  thing which is curious. Actually the black surface radiate heat better than the reflecting white surfaces. And the mirror polished surfaces has the least temperature radiation coefficient. Here is a list of some common materials and paints temperature radiation coefficients: basically it shows that rough surfaces has better emissivity than the mirror polished surfaces.
OK So we have black mat paint but will this help much? This is good CPU cooler this is true. But it use fan to blow air and it removes the heat away by convection not by radiation. Isn't this so special coating just extra added value which wont make much difference from normal barbeque paint for example. Well the important thing is that it looks "cool".

Xigmatek HDT- Heat-pipe Direct Touch Technology.

Next thing about this cooler is the direct touch technology or with other words. The heat pipes are bended and grinded in such way that they touch the CPU directly this also should help the CPU cooling. Also they use three 8 mm heat pipes instead of 6 mm like most CPU coolers. And they say that the 3x8 mm is better than 4x6 mm. I have seen this on one of mine CPU coolers - Enzotech extreme-x rev.a It has 4x8mm heat pipes and on the online reviews it topped the down-facing CPU-coolers so I guess its true - the thicker heat-pipes conduct better than the thinner heat-pipes. And some top CPU coolers also use 8 mm.

2. Prolimatech black Megahalems.

Prolimatech ofers nice top tower CPU coolers that are painted black. Actually the Megahalems models comes in three special edition models with red, blue and black color.

This heat sink comes with six heat-pipes 6 mm thick.

It comes with different back plates for different sockets allowing mounting on any system.
It doesn't come with fans. You  have to choose the fans by yourself. The fan clips allow to mount two 12 or 14 cm fan for push-pull configuration. And for sure this fan looks really nice. Cool, big and awesome.

2.1 Prolimatech black Genesis and Armageddon Blue Series

Two more CPU coolers from Prolimatech comes in black color. It seems that they have seen the need of such products on the market. Since like already said - the CPU cooler is not the most important part of the PC but for sure is the most impressive.

Black Genesis Series

Black Genesis CPU cooler is one strange cooler with its shape. But it offers cooling not only of the CPU but also on the RAM and the whole mother board. It has one flaw... its kinda big and you will need good big PC case to be able to mount it.

Armageddon Blue Series

Well its name says "Blue" But blue is just a small touch on the whole heat-sink so I decided to add it to the list.

3. BeQuiet Dark Rock Pro 3.

Now this is product from BeQuite! company and they pay special attention not only to the performance but to the noise levels too. The name of the CPU cooler really match its look. With weight of 1.197 kg its one pretty big cooler.

BeQuiet Dark Rock Pro 3

 Coming with 7 heat-pipes which done end in one line ass seen on the picture bellow it looks really nice. Also the back side of the Heat-sink is with crossed sections which also should reduce the noise. This makes the outer look of the cooler even better.

Dark Rock Pro 3 back side.

It comes with two fans 120 mm outside fan and 135 mm inner fan. It looks more like push-push configuration than push-pull configuration. It also support 3rd fan with the fan clips coming with the box.

Side view of Dark Pro 3. 

Palit presents new fanless videocard GTX 750 KalmX

Plait presents new passive cooling videocard. With massive heat sink and two heatpipes the new GTX750 KalmX will be one cool and pretty powerful video card. The name of the card "calm" represents exactly this - no fans only fins :)

GTX750 Ti big heat sink

The 750 and 750 Ti series has pretty low power consumptions allowing this fanless version to exist. Actualy this pretty much is the limit of the passive cooling videocards. I don't think that there will be fanless version of the GTX 760 with it's 170W power consumption. For comparison the power consumption of normal GTX 750 Ti is 55W.
So if you are looking for quiet video card this is one good solution and pretty much the limit of the passive cooling.

ASUS ARES III ROG - The dual GPU video card with water cooling.

ASUS presented its fastest dual GPU video card. On Computex 2014 they showed the ASUS ARES III ROG video card intended to be used only with water cooling. As you can see it doesnt has any fins or fans for air cooling just two connectors for water cooling. The thing that makes this card special is not just the water cooling. Its made to take only one PCI slot. Its thin and its not taking much space. This is maybe the fastest one slot video card. The old version ASUS ARES II ROG was coming with integrated water cooling module. This time ASUS decided to leave the cooling for the end client.

ASUS ARES III ROG

This is not cheap video card with 2 Hawaii XT cores working on 1030 MHz and the chips are hand picked from other cores to have less power consumption and clock-ability, with 8GB of DDR5 RAM and only 500 units produced it will come at price of 2000$-2500$.

ASUS promise that the hand picked GPU cores will have 25% cooler performance than the reference GPU cores on a normal video card. The cooler performance will also mean that the cores will clock better and with good water-cooling block the card has really good over-clock potential. The core voltage will be digital controlled, with nice steps(like on the old ASUS cards)

There is another "cool" thing about the card. Since it is a limited edition with only 500 units produced. On every card there will be serial number from 1 to 500 (on the bottom corner of the card as seen on the picture).


Here is the official ASUS ARES III web page.
http://rog.asus.com/324562014/gaming-graphics-cards-2/ares-iii-limited-edition-unlimited-power/

Intel Core i7-5960X – eight cores 3.0GHz, 140W TDP

At last the big Intel Haswell-E cores are coming. There will be three different CPU's One with eight cores - i7-5960X - 3GHz and two with six cores i7-5930K - 3.5GHz and i7-5820K - 3.3GHz. All of the CPU's are with TDP of 140W and like you can see on the eight core i7-5930K it's with reduced operating frequency in order to keep the TDP in the 140W limits.

New i7 Haswell-E CPUs - image from legitreviews.com

All of the CPU/s will support Hyper-Threading which means that the top CPU will have 16 logical cores and the other two 12 logical cores. The interesting things is that they wont support ECC server memory but they will support DDR4 memory and they will need Intel X99 Express motherboard to work.

The price tag expected for them is 999$ for the top CPU and around 600$ for the other two. Of-course there is time before this cpu-s comes to the market so lets see what Intel will have in mind about them.

AMD will add SATA Express

AMD will follow Intel and will add SATA Express in their new chip sets. SATA Express is the new upcoming interface for storage devices. Basically it is two SATA connectors bounded together. But SATA3 offers 6GB/s transfer rate and SATA Express offers 10GB/s. So this mean that two GB/s transfer speed has been lost somewhere on the road. But there are still benefits of it. Since on the market has been introduced PCI-Express solid stated drives (SSD) which allows better performance over SATA-connected device, the engineers of the big companies are trying to improve the storage device interfaces. This comes on the table especially after the improvement of the SSD technology. So for now the SATA-Express is something like doubled SATA3 interface.
The new SATA-Express and the old SATA3 connectors will be compatible and SATA3 hard-drive could be connected straight to the new connector.
Some companies like ASUS already said that their future motherboards will be SATA-Express compliant. AMD will pay to ASMedia for SIP (silicon intellectual property) for the rights to integrate the new interface controller straight in to its chips. In this way the price of the motherboard will be lower because no extra chips will be placed. And AMD will be paying licence fee for every chip with SATA-Express.

(ASMedia Technology is subsidiary of ASUSTek Computer)

Intel Devil’s Canyon 4790K - first 4GHz Intel Core CPU

Intel will produce new Intel Core CPU - I7-4790K with base clock frequency 4GHz and boost frequency of 4.4GHz. This information comes from EXPReview.com,  accoridng to them from leaked information from pdf file.
This is 500MHz higher clock frequency than I7-4770K or 20%higher. Not only the frequncy will be higher but the CPU will have special thermal compound between the crystal itself and the metal box of the CPU. This should ensure normal work temperatures at the higher clock frequency.

The CPU's  will be picked up to ensure that they are units capable of better overclocking. This and the special thermal interface material will probably mean that the price will be higher than the "normal" I7-4770K.

Redux - the new Noctua fan series

The new series Redux of Noctua is now on the market. Many gamers has complained that the two standard colours of Noctua - light brown and red brown are not always appropriate to blend in al other colors inside the PC case. On other hand Noctua wants to keep their products distinct from the other products on the market. And their little bit strange colors are exactly what gives their unique look. Actually it is enough to see part of the fan to see the brown color and you can say: "Oh, yes Noctua." And this is exactly what Noctua wants. A time ago they have released industrial series of fans. In these fans they have put small brown plastic at the corners of the fan, keeping everything else black, again the brown color was speaking "Noctua". This time their series Redux is coming and it seems that it color scheme is completely different. Actually there is no tiny nuance of brown anywhere, the whole fan, the frame and the propeller are completely grey - no other colors. The one thing that they kept is that the frame is lighter and the propeller darker.

So Redux... the new series on the market. Technically they are completely the same like the normal Noctua fan. But they come with reduced price. How this happens? Simple by sending less accessors in the package. Its possible that the company wants to get more market share going in the middle class segment of the market.

The available models are 13 the models names are NF-P14, NF-S12B, NF-B9 и NF-R8. The rotating speed varies between 700RPM and 1800RPM. There are five 14cm models - all with square frames only NF-P14r comes with round frame. Three versions of S12B the 12cm models and three versions of the R8 models. B9 models comes in only 2 models.

Anyway if you want to put the silent Noctua fan inside you PC now you can do this on more affordable price. The 14cm fans will cost 15.90eu, the 12cm 13.90eu, the 92mm will cost 11.90eu and the 80mm - 10.90eu.

Quiet fanless CPU cooler - Silverstone Heligon HE02

The fanless CPU cooler!

The fanless SPU coolers are something very interesting. They need to pull away the heat from the CPU and to dissipate it in the surrounding air and all this without a fan that blow the heat away!
To achieve this goal the fanless CPU coolers need few things:

1st Huge surface that dissipate the heat.

Few things determinate the heat transfer, the surface, the bigger is better, the airflow, higher speed airflow is better, and the temperature difference between the heated object and the air.

So the huge surface is must have in a fanless design because there is missing the artificial airflow from the fan. as you can see on the picture:

Silverstone Heligon HE02 CPU cooler

As you can see there are a lot of fins increasing the surface - helping the heat transfer.
There are also 6 heat pipes that transfer the heat from the cpu to every single fin, even the last one.

2nd Big size of the CPU cooling tower

Because there is no fan attached, the big size of the cooler helps to take the heat far away from the CPU where it can be spread without heating the CPU back or keeping the cooler at higher temperature.
Here are the sizes of the cooler:

Silverstone Heligon HE02 dimensions

3rd A little bit surprisingly but.... Airflow!

Surprisingly but the heat sink still needs and airflow to spread the heat in the air. But here is the tricky part.
The Heligon HE02 is counting on natural convection of the air to take the heat away. And the natural convection is not very powerful. In order to ensure enough airflow - the heat sink is made with large space between the fins compared to the CPU coolers with fan. In this way its easier for the air to move through the fins.
Of course this mean that on same size you can put less number of fins that's why the Silverstone decided to make the fins with bigger surface. As you can see on the picture above with the dimensions the cooler is wider that its taller with 170 x 130 mm wide and 160 mm - tall this is pretty much one big cubic chunk of copper and aluminium!

Specifications of Heligion HE02

Dimension: 170mm(W) x 130mm(D) x 160mm (H)

CPU TDP: Fanless 95W (varies depending on chassis airflow)
                  Fanless with 120mm fan in case > 900rpm - 150W
                  1 x 120mm fan – over 150W

Sockets:     Intel Socket LGA775/1150/1155/1156/1366/2011
                  AMD Socket AM2/AM3/FM1/FM2

As you can see even fanless it can cool up to 95W TDP CPUs - these are Anything bellow Intel i5 and for AMD below FX-6300 or FX-4300
If there is one 120mm fan in the PC case. The TDP jumps to 150W. This mean that if there is one 120mm fan located near the cooler that helps the airflow you can cool i7 or FX-8xxx.
If you attach one fan to the heat sink itself you can use this cooler to overclock CPUs with power over 150W!