The processors of today are getting extremely fast as we quickly approach the 4GHz mark! Despite Intel and even AMDs best efforts, running processors at these clock speeds creates a great deal of heat. Currently the best way for users to combat this problem is to resort to more elaborate cooling setups. Much hope was placed on the new Gigabyte Rocket cooler series to deliver the cooling performance that was required to run a 3.6GHz Pentium 4 processor at reasonable temperatures. Unfortunately, while this solution does operate at near silence, it was unable to tame the abundance of heat generated by this highly clocked P4 processor.

Thermalright have always been respected for their ability to keep even the hottest processors at a safe operating temperature, under even the most stressful conditions. Unfortunately, one of their latest heatsinks designed for the Pentium 4 and Athlon64 platforms, does not support the latest P4 LGA775 processors. These are the highly clocked Pentium 4 processors that I have found operating at extreme temperatures. However, I discovered that the new XP-90 by Thermalright, can be installed on the LGA775 processors using the Gigabyte mounting mechanism.

The design of this new Thermalright heatsink reminds me a lot of the Shuttle XPC I.C.E heatsink. While in their current form they dont look much alike, I imagine the I.C.E heatsink looking exactly the same if the radiator part of the cooler was folded over onto the heatsink. This is how the XP-90 looks, its like there is a small heatsink on the bottom with a much larger one on top. However, this is not the case as the heatsink is whole. Though there are four heatpipes connecting from the base of the heatsink through to the top of the fins.

As I mentioned earlier, Thermalright have produced a number of high performance cooling solutions. They now also offer a wide range of universal coolers designed for both AMD and Intel platforms. Their universal heatsinks may be nothing new, nor is their heatpipe technology, however when it comes to universal designs their's always make sense. Heatpipe technology is now widely used throughout the cooling industry and many high-end products will feature it. The XP-90 makes use of four very long aluminum heatpipes.

Today I will be testing the XP-90 which is designed for both the Intel and AMD platforms. The heatsink is quite large as you would probably expect and as the name suggests, it can support 90mm fans. The XP-90 is actually joining its bigger brother the XP-120. Thermalright's XP series is designed to offer the end-user superior cooling and high performance, while designed for use with lower noise fans!