Today we are checking out the most insane air-cooled CPU cooler ever created, the Thermalright TRUE Copper. This incredible heatsink weighs more and costs more than anything we have seen before. Thankfully it performs pretty bloody well, which should peak the interests of more than a few overclockers...
Thermalright makes some of the industry’s best performance coolers and they have been doing so for many years now. The Ultra-120 has been one of their greatest achievements and until recently it has been the best performing cooler we have tested. What makes the Ultra-120 heatsinks so good is not just the low temperatures that it produces when paired with a high-end CPU, it is also how quietly it is able achieve those results.
The original design has been modified over time, adding extra heatpipes for even greater performance, though the materials used have essentially remained the same. The Ultra-120 Extreme for example is a copper/aluminum cooler that stands an impressive 16cm tall and weighs in at just under 800 grams. For a high-end air-cooler these specifications are not excessive, as most competing products share similar specs.
However there is now a new version of the Ultra-120 Extreme, known as the TRUE Copper. Although the dimensions and design are very much the same, there is one key specification that is vastly different. While the Ultra-120 Extreme weighs nearly 800 grams, this new TRUE Copper cooler checks in at 1.9kg and yes, you read that correctly.
The TRUE Copper, as the name suggests, truly is a copper heatsink featuring no other material what so ever. Being that copper is much heavier than aluminum, the weight of the TRUE Copper is unlike anything we have ever seen before, and that is simply because no manufacturer has been crazy enough to produce an all copper version of any heatsink.
Other than an insane weight, there are a few other things to consider, and one of those things is the price. Being a huge 100% copper cooler we expected the price tag of the TRUE Copper to actually be much more than it really is. Still, at around $100 US it is not going to be for everyone, costing more than an Intel Core 2 Duo E4600 processor for example.
Obviously the biggest concern we have with the TRUE Copper is the weight, and at 1.9kg there is quite a lot of it. When mounted on the test bed, which has it sitting horizontally, there were no issues as the heatsink is not pulling on the motherboard or its mounting gear. While it can go inside a normal ATX case, we would not dare move the system without first removing the heatsink. This is certainly not an ideal product for LAN goers.
