INTRODUCTION

   During the past decade PC Cooling has clearly advanced but nowhere near compared to other interior hardware parts like storage media, mainboards, CPUs and graphics cards. Of course there were some bold attempts from certain manufacturers like Danamics that tried to introduce liquid metal cooling to the masses but although their last solution yielded quite impressive results its price tag made it very unattractive to consumers especially since one could get a more complete water-cooling kit/loop at around the same price tag for use with both the CPU and GPU. Unfortunately the trend didn't continue and so today we still need to pick between the regular and all time classic air-coolers (U/C designs) or the more advanced and most of the time better water-coolers (AIO/Kits) both of which are more than capable in delivering on what they promise. However there's always been clearance issues with most of the tower design air-coolers that forced people either to purchase low-profile memory kits or change the placement of the cooler resulting in reduced performance. Well Thermaltake seems to have a solution to that problem with their latest NIC (Non Interference Coolers) line of air-coolers.

   Our Mission "Delivering the perfect user experience". The beginning of every myth and legend is about dreams and desire: the challenging, creative and combative features of Thermaltake Group create an exciting and fascinating user experience to share with everyone, while allowing users to enter a selfless state in terms of function and potential. Thermaltake Group's 3 main brands: Thermaltake, Tt eSPORTS and LUXA2 have been merchandising throughout the world, and have successfully established 6 business footholds in areas such as Europe, America, Oceania, Japan and China, with 95 regional distributors and over 4000 premium retailers. All product planning is orientated by observation of global PC peripheral market and understanding of consumer demands. Thermaltake creates direct contact opportunities with resellers and consumers by participating major global ICT exhibitions and trade shows every year, and develop innovative marketing strategies for the promotions of new products. Meanwhile, Thermaltake incorporates the composite marketing system by making branch offices and regional distributors both the distribution channel and technical support or service center to provide instant support; by maintaining close contact with end users, we manage to strengthen corporate competitiveness and create the momentum for the growth of accomplishments. With its outstanding wisdom and strength, Thermaltake Group is recruiting creative talents to build a cultural brand for the enjoyment of entertainment, e-Sports, technology and lifestyle!

   Thermaltake sent us the C5 model which happens to be the top-end in the entire NiC line (above the F3,F4 and C4 models) and is aimed towards enthusiasts and overclockers mainly due to its size and the two high-RPM 120mm fans in push and pull configuration. Now although at first glance the NiC C5 looks a lot like the Frio Advanced CPU Cooler (both coolers also share the same TDP of 230W) it's actually a tad taller and wider but at the same time it's also quite thinner to allow for more space around it (thus no interference). Also just like the Frio Advanced the NiC C5 comes ready with two equally fast 120mm fans (100RPM less than the ones bundled with the Frio Advanced) which automatically means that we don't expect whisper quiet results from the cooler, far from it actually, however for people who require maximum performance noise levels hardly ever make a difference. Our job today is to find out exactly what kind of cooling performance one can expect from the latest NiC C5 and in the following pages we will cover exactly that.