Thermoengine V60-4210 Heatsink Review

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Of all the heatsinks we reviewed, the Thermoengine is one of the most uniquely designed, and most effective. In fact, I'm going to skip the suspenseful stuff and tell you outright that this is probably the best heatsink we have ever seen.

The Thermoengine is designed for ultimate efficiency; it's superbly quiet, optimally configured, and most importantly, can cool like a little devil. This little heatsink is even patented by its makers, Thermosonic Technologies. Now just imagine all that, but done up in solid copper! Okay, okay, on with the review - it's a good one!

Note: We've updated this article to clarify a few points which were causing some confusion and to bring to light an interesting situation regarding the thermistors accuracy in the heatsinks exhaust air.

Designed for: AMD Athlon 1.5GHz, Intel FCPGA 1.13GHZ processors; fits on PGA and K6-2

The Thermoengine V60-4210 Model: V60-4210 Extruded Aluminum design with special hollow inner channel. YS Tech Fan, 5500 RPM Fan is 35 dBA loud and moves about 20CFM Dim: 10x60x60mm, 12V, 2.04W HS Dimensions: 42x60x60mm Weight: 258 grams Comes with phase change thermal pad Made by: ThermoEngine

First Impressions:

If's rare that we get exited about a heatsink, and even rarer that we get excited about the box it comes in. The ThermoEngine comes in nice little die-cut foam lined box. For a heatsink, this is some serious packaging. A set of very clear instructions are included to explain how to attach, and remove the heatsink from the socket. The removal process requires a screw driver as the clip has no thumb lever however.

The clip puts about 20 pounds of force on the chip die so there is no fear of it coming loose, ever. There is a clear plastic cover over the thermal phase change material which needs to be removed before attaching the heatsink for the first time. The phase change material is light gray in colour and will quickly thin to the proper consistency once it is warmed by the cpu die. In our tests, we found that the thermal compound on the ThermoEngine is about as thermally conductive as our standard thermal compound. I found this very surprising as phase change materials are usually worse then a good thermal goo. Not the case with this material though.

The fan plugs directly into the motherboard with a 20cm lead wire. RPM monitoring is standard. Incidentally the standard fan on the ThermoEngine is very quiet, but for the overclocker, a bit under powered. Dropping in a nice loud 25x60x60mm 7,000RPM fan can further increase the performance characteristics of this heatsink if you wish to.