nPowerTek NPH-1000

Heatsink Test – Joe

SUMMARY: Very good cooling with relatively quiet fan.

The good guys at Thermal Transtech were nice enough to send a sample of their nPowerTek NPH-1000 heatsink to test out. This is a bit different from other heatpipes in that the heatpipes wrap around the outer edge of the heatsink’s fins:

Note also that the fins are arranged around the fan in a semi-circle. This makes best use of the fan since almost all the fan’s energy is at the blade’s tips. This arrangement coupled with the extensive use of copper should help its performance.

Key Features

• Material: Copper fins, heatppes and base
• Fan: 2200 rpm, 40 cfm, 28 dBA, 95 x 25 mm, fan speed controller
• Heatsink Size: 99 x 45 x 118 mm; Weight 510 grams
• CPU Mounts: LGA775, AM2, K8

The base appears shiny and is reasonably flat:

Parts that ship with the heatsink:

I had a problem mounting this unit on my Asus P5WD2 motherboard – the “X” looking piece includes a foam layer over the metal bracket – the combination (even with the foam compressed) did not allow sufficient clearance for the bolts to securely mount the heatsink to the motherboard; I used another bracket from NPH to mount it – the bolts can only go so far on the motherboard and they were maxed out, so the mounting I used is representative.

The nPowerTek NPH-1000 was tested on an Asus P5WD2 motherboard P4 Motherboard Test Platform with a modified Pentium D 805 to read CPU case temps (both supplied by Directron).

¹MBM on-die temperatures.
²50 dBA measured 8″ from the fan intake corresponds to about 30 dBA measured 3 feet from the fan, a very quiet noise level.

Results place the nPowerTek NPH-1000 in upper rank of heatsinks tested to date (Heatsink Ranking).

The nPowerTek NPH-1000 does a very good cooling job and the fan is relatively quiet – a nice package for decent cooling at low noise – the included fan speed controller will reduce noise further but with reduced performance. Overall this is an attractive cooling solution, although I did have a mounting problem.

Thanks again to Thermal Transtech for sending this our way to try out.

Disclosure: Joe Citarella has a financial interest in a company developing cooling products for electronic chip cooling.

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