Results

First things first – I just hope your mouse wheel works! We've also got around to throwing in some results for the Intel stock cooler – you'll find them at the very bottom of the page.

I had my reservations about the Thermalright, but just... WOW! We had strapped the 1,400RPM Noctua fan to it not really expecting much, but it would be my ideal fan of choice since it's actually silent, not just "silent" like so many packaging claims. It's the second best performing cooler we've seen to date and the only one that can deliver such excellent cooling performance without your PC sounding like a jet engine.

You have to drop down the table all the way to the Zerotherm BTF90 or Thermaltake coolers on mid-low fan speed before you reach an equally tolerable noise level – the Thermalright Ultra 120 eXtreme quite simply obliterates this record.

It's almost a shame we've pitted the Zerotherm up against it because it's an excellent CPU cooler in and of itself. At high fan speed it may even outperform the Thermalright on the graph, but if you were to use a 2,300RPM fan on the Thermalright it would perform even better still. That said, we can't recommend using either of these two heatsinks with a 2,300RPM fan though because it’s just far too loud.

The low fan mode drops the Zerotherm in around the Thermaltake MaxOrb / Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro range for an appreciable noise, which is very good at 1,000RPM, but to my ears the fan is tolerable all the way up to 1,700RPM which should put it around the Zerotherm BTF90 performance and also touching the “high fan” performance we’ve seen from a lot of coolers.