You all know very well that the cooler bundled with the boxed Intel Core 2 Duo processors is hardly fit for their extreme overclocking, although in nominal mode and during moderate overclocking it can perform quite well. As for the operational modes that are far beyond the nominal boundaries, the “boxed” cooler becomes too noisy especially after long-term operation in such a mode. So, in most cases, it is this cooler that limits the processor overclocking potential.

You can replace the reference CPU cooler with any efficient CPU air-cooler, and we have already reviewed tons of them in our site. However, these solutions are usually pretty expensive and may not always fit because of their extreme dimensions. Moreover, not everyone really needs the cooling efficiency of a solution like Thermalright SI-128 SE or Scythe Infinity. There are a lot of overclocking fans out there who would be more than happy to replace their boxed cooler with a quiet and efficient solution that wouldn’t cost a fortune. So, today we are going to briefly talk about three coolers from a budget price segment that are priced around $20.

Testing Participants

TITAN TTC-NK64TZ/PW (BX)

The first budget cooler that we will be talking about today comes in a small cardboard box. Everything in its looks indicates that it is indeed a budget solution:

The cooler is bundled with a small tube of pretty efficient Titan Nano Grease (TTG-G30015) thermal compound. That is the only accessory we found in the box.

The cooler design is pretty ordinary: it includes a small aluminum heatsink with its plate array sitting on three copper heatpipes 6mm in diameter. The whole thing is topped with a 92 x 92 x 25mm fan:

There is actually nothing to dwell on here. I would only like to add that there are 45 aluminum plates in the heatsink array, each about 0.2~0.25mm thick. The gap between the plates measures 1.5mm. Everything else you can see from a series of photos below:

The cooler weighs about 350g and is a little shorter than 90mm. TITAN TTC-NK64TZ/PW (BX) is equipped with a fan featuring so-called “Z-AXIS” bearing with 60,000 hours MTBF. The fan supports PWM rotation speed control from ~900RPM to ~2700RPM (±10%) with the maximum airflow of ~49.37CFM. it generates about 22.2dBA of noise.

The distinguishing feature of TITAN TTC-NK64TZ/PW (BX) cooler is heatpipe direct touch technology in the base of the cooler that TITAN refers to as EDM:

It is for the first time that we see a budget cooler solution employ heatpipe direct touch approach. Although, we have to admit that TITAN TTC-NK64TZ/PW (BX) has a really budget implementation of it. The distance between the heatpipes in the cooler base is 4mm, so the aluminum plate in the base will hardly be able to make up for uneven heat distribution. However, let’s not guess here and wait for the test results.

The cooler is designed exclusively for LGA775 platforms and is fastened with standard push-pin retention:

The heatpipes coming out of the cooler base do not interfere with the memory DIMMs as well as the chipset heatsink of our Gigabyte GA-X38-DQ6 mainboard, although they appear very close to these components during installation.

This cooler is priced at ~$14.