IFX time

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The IFX-14 is packaged in the normal eye-catching and colourful box, which is simply a standard mailing carton with IFX-14 printed in the bottom corner in black. There is really little to make this fly off the shelves, but as I have said before, you are more likely to receive this from a mail-order company rather than pop down to your local PC-World decent hardware vendor and grab one.

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Once out the box you’ll have to make sure that you have all of the different bits and pieces that make it possible to mount this heatsink on both Intel’s and AMD’s latest sockets. Suffice to say you get all the necessary bits and bobs to strap this to your 775 or AM2 socket, the heatsink itself and the backplate cooler.

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The main body of the heatsink isn’t particularly different from other tower coolers, although it is split in half resulting in two separate stacks of fins. There are the usual heatpipes which quickly feed the fins with heat in order for them to dissipate the therms as fast as possible. These heatpipes are fat (8mm), very fat, and there are four of them in a U-shape with the apex at the contact pad resulting in effectively eight heat-tunnelling pipes.

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The whole heatsink is silver in colour and the fins are made of aluminium. The bottom of the heatsink, the interface pad, is nickel coated copper. It’s reasonably reflective, although it could be a lot better, more important however is if it’s flat.

How flat this pad is carries much more significance than how shiny it is which you can easily get carried away with. Getting a shiny, flat surface is difficult; getting a shiny, lumpy surface is easy. Read more about this in our glossary article here.

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The heatsink is designed around a pair of towers which face each other. There is a space between which doesn’t feature any fins which seems odd, although they would increase the already motherboard-breaking weight of 790g sans fan. These towers are held in place with the thick heatpipes which run all the way up the fins terminating at the top.

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The fins themselves are designed to look like flames, which looks much better than just a rectangle of aluminium, but lends itself to cables getting hooked.

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The second heatsink, which is designed to be used on the back of your motherboard, is much more reasonable in its dimensions. It uses a shiny pad to connect with a spongy interface cushion to the back of the CPU area. This is then piped through a pair of squashed heatpipes to a heatsink which – when installed – will poke out the top of your motherboard just behind the PSU. This extra heatsink is described as being able to cool your entire motherboard and to extend its life expectancy and stability; serious stuff for a tiny heatsink.

Both of the heatsink are up to the normal standards of quality that Thermalright puts into its heatsinks. Everything feels sturdy although the backplate heatpipes can be bent easily.