Camp cooling

All the butterfly coolers sent by QuietPC are packed in shiny silver boxes with a little window showing you what they look like. I have the BTF80, BTF90, and BTF95. The BTF80 is aluminium with a fan, the BTF90 is copper with the same fan, and the BTF95 is a fanless version; made of copper.

Inside the boxes, you’ll find the same bits for all the coolers. You get an Intel backplate, Intel bracket, AMD bracket, screws, a manual and the all important heat paste/grease/goo.

All the coolers are based on the same design. They have 4 heatpipes that bend around in a U shape to make contact with the interface pad twice. This means there are 8 places where the heatpipes connect to the cooling pad. These heatpipes connect to the 46 for the fan designs, and 31 thicker fins for the fanless design. All the fins are shaped like a butterfly when you look at them from the top down.

The fan designs have the fan mount looking like antennae and the fan is on one side with no finger guard or anything else to guard your fingers from slicing. The fanless design obviously doesn’t have a fan mount, and instead there is a shiny top plate which looks even more like a butterfly.

The fans have two integrated LED’s which will shine through the fan when in use, much like the GX810 reviewed earlier.

All over the design, there are little ZEROtherm logos which let you know that they are proud of this design, and it definitely looks far from OEM. The choice of a butterfly shape is probably due to that fact that the shape of the fins is effective, and a little modification made them butterfly like. Honestly, it might frighten people off who are going to be showing off their cases; these coolers will have to perform well to be welcomed to the market.

The 92mm fans on the BTF80 and BTF90 pump up to 43.8 CFM and make a maximum of 27dBA in the process. The fans are all controlled by a 4 pin connector (PWM) which means that your BIOS decides the best speed for it. You can of course just plug it into a standard 3 pin connector and have it running full pelt all the time.

The mounting plates can be used on Intel socket LGA775 and AMD 754, 939, 940 and AM2. This wide range of compatibility is a great sign for a varied market of sockets.

Interestingly, the fanless design has a smaller dissipation area as it has less fins. These fins are thicker than the fan designs which have relatively flimsy fins which can be easily bent. The BTF95 has 2,936 cm2 of heat losing area, while the BTF80 and BTF90 have 4,404 cm2. I wonder if this will effect performance, or if the thicker fins have to be like that for passive performance.

All the coolers have a copper base which is nicely polished as the screw test shows. The base is also flat meaning less heatpaste is needed and a better contact with your CPU core.

The coolers are quite petite, and won’t cause problems due to their size. The heatpipes raise the body of the cooler away from motherboard components preventing contact and installation headaches.