HDT Cooler Shootout!
Sunbeam Core-Contact Freezer Overview
Sunbeam is a company familiar to modders. They are well known for their rheostats, fan controllers and other modding accessories. On the CPU cooling front, Sunbeam is most well known for their Tuniq Tower 120 heatsink. According to Sunbeam, the new ‘Core-Contact Freezer’ is the Tower 120’s successor and outperforms it by a healthy margin. Since we’ve tested the Tower 120 recently, we’ll be able to validate this claim.
Image courtesy of Sunbeamtech
Specifications (taken from the Sunbeamtech product page at www.sunbeamtech.com)
- Combined Dimensions: 125mm(L) × 104mm(W) × 155mm(H)
- Weight (without fan): 590g
- Material Types: Copper (heat-pipes), aluminium (cooling fins)
- Configuration: Tower with U shaped heatpipes
- Heatpipe Width/Quantity: 8mm, 4 heatpipes
- Supported Sockets: Sockets 775, AM2 and 754/939
- Fan Dimensions: 120 x 120 x 25mm
- Bearing Type: MFDB (Magnetic Fluid Dynamic Bearing)
- Noise Level: 16dBA
- Air Flow: 90CFM (without fan controller)
- Speed: 1000-2000RPM (can be adjusted with included fan controller)
The Core-Contact freezer weighs in at a very reasonable 590g and stands 155mm tall. It should be able to fit into the majority of mid-tower cases. Some specifications of interest include the four large 8mm heatpipes and included high-flow, MFDB fan.
The Core-Contact Freezer came packaged in a pretty simple cardboard box. Some of the relevant specifications are printed on the back.
Aside from the usual mounting hardware, the Core-Contact Freezer includes several extras—a fan controller and their premium grade TX-2 thermal paste. I was very pleased to see that Sunbeam included a well-written, easy to follow instruction manual with the Core-Contact Freezer. The Tower 120’s manual left quite a bit to be desired.
The heatsink itself is quite a sight. It employs an odd fin shape—it resembles an arrow with an indentation where the fan mounts and on each side.
The front portion of each fin is bent downwards slightly. This helps to provide some additional airflow to the CPU VR components—something tower heatsinks generally don’t do.
The heatsink is fairly slim, at only 104mm wide.
Four, 8mm heatpipes are used on the Core-Contact Freezer. Most heatpipes are of the 6mm variety, so these are substantially larger.
The HDT or “Heatpipe Direct Touch” technology has been used by several companies, including Xigmatek, OCZ and of course, Sunbeam. The base is polished and completely flat as verified by our straight edge. I checked each heatpipe individually and was very impressed. The gaps between the base material and the heatpipes are very small, which means that heaps of thermal interface is not required for a good mount. I’ll speak more to thermal interface application in the next section.
Sunbeam includes a high quality, MFDB fan. What I love best about it is the 90CFM at 2000RPM it produces. It is not easy to find 120×25mm fans that can move that much air. Sunbeam includes a fan controller for those more sensitive to noise. I’ll speak more to the fan in the fan testing section. There are small foam pads adhered to each corner of the fan—probably to help with vibration and noise. The adhesive used is very weak and the pads kept falling off, unfortunately.
Sunbeam has bundled their award winning TX-2 thermal paste with the Core-Contact Freezer. I’ve been hearing very good things about this paste, so you can look forward to some testing of it in a future review.
