The Cooler

The 055 cooler is a Copper/Aluminum cooler based on heatpipes. It sports a 92 mm fan that is capable of pushing out around 48 CFM. With a height of 133 mm and weighs in at 650 g, it's not a small heatsink. It is rated to perform up to 130 Watts of heat, and supports a broad range of applications such as Socket 754, 939, 940, 478 and 775.


When it comes to air coolers nowadays, heatpipes seem to be the thing to have. More and more coolers come with heatpipes as part of the cooler now. Even AMD's stock Opteron/FX heatsinks use heatpipes in them. Some coolers use heatpipes just as an extra method to transfer heat away from the CPU, whilst others, use the heatpipes as the primary way of moving the heat around. With the 055 cooler, it uses eight heatpipes (four on each side) to carry all the heat up the the physical sink of the unit.


The 92 mm fan is mounted to the cooler via four rubber dampeners. These significantly reduce vibration and noise from the cooler. The fan is easily removed and replaceable. On the other side of the cooler, there are four additional mounting holes. Therefore, it is possible to mount a second fan if one pleases. Where there is no other fan on the other side, the actual plate where the extra fan could be mounted is a little loose. On the other side where the stock fan is, the bottom end of the plate is kept in place by the fan. One thing I'd like to point out in the far left picture of the cooler's top, is the ends of the heatpipes. Each of the ends are different, and are not well finished. The bottom right three are nice, but the rest just look plain messy.


The fan itself is made by X-FAN, which is simply part of XIGMATEK. It's pretty much your standard 92 mm fan with RPM sensors and so on. One thing different than most other fans though, is it uses a 4 pin Molex, much like an FDD Molex connector. The forth wire makes up the PWM (pulse-width modulation) power connector. This connector is only seen on new motherboards and is just a different way of controlling the fan's speed. It produces a much cleaner voltage, which in return makes the fan more efficient and quieter in operation. Don't worry if your board doesn't have one of the 4pin connectors - the fan can still use just the regular 3 pins (or even 2 pins) to run the fan.