As time moves forward technology improves and our gadgets get faster and smaller. This exponential growth is unfortunately not shared in the realm of heatsinks. Sure we have heat pipes and direct-touch coolers which didn’t exist years ago. But we also know where the finish line is; ambient temperature. As long as we are dealing with passive cooling, (i.e. air cooling and water cooling) we will never be able to get below ambient temps on our CPUs. So with that in mind, every heatsink manufacturer attempts to outdo each other in the race to the bottom.

Our long time champion, the Thermalright Ultra Extreme 120 AKA the "TRUE-120," has been challenged as of late but not dethroned. We have four challengers today that are going to do their best to claim the top spot. They are: the ZALMAN CNPS10X Extreme, the Noctua NH-U12P SE1366, the Titan Fenrir and the COGAGE TRUE Spirit. Let’s see just what these coolers bring to the table and if any of them has what it takes to earn the top spot.

All testing of the coolers will occur on our new LGA1366 test bed. Consisting of the GIGABYTE X58-Extreme motherboard, six gigabytes of Corsair DDR3 RAM paired with the Intel Core i7 920 retail processor. With four cores and a total of eight threads expect to see lots of heat. The video card of choice is the NVIDIA 9500 GT thanks to its low heat output and silent fan.

Read the entire article at HardOCP.