CoolAge X120TF CPU Cooler review

Performance Analysis

A company shipping a cooler without a fan is both a blessing and a curse. It lowers the cost and you can potentially bag a cooler for a few quid less than it might otherwise. Most enthusiasts will have a half-decent fan knocking around too, or will appreciate the ability to choose exactly which fan they can install. In the case of the X120TF, the ideal situation would be to couple it with a high-CFM fan to make the most of the tight fin pitch. However, we need to keep things fair to other coolers that we test that ship without a fan so we need to standardise the test kit. The fan we use is the Sharkoon Silent Eagle 1200 which pushes a decent amount of air without sounding like a hoover.

Despite the fact its design has some interesting tweaks, the CoolAge X120TF didnt give us any groundbreaking numbers in the cooling tests. On the LGA1366 system, the idle delta T of 17°C was fine - it's pretty average - but under load things went somewhat downhill. The delta T of 57°C hardly justifies the upgrade from a reference cooler; it's better than another HSF from a new company we tested recently, the Gelid Tranquillo, but the Tranquillo is extremely quiet. Unlike the X120TF, it also comes with LGA1156 mounts, and does well there.

During testing, the X120TF became extremely hot. With the densely packed sheets of alluminium, the cooler remained hot for about 35 minutes after we had uninstalled it from the LGA1366 thermal test rig. Clearly, the six heatpipes and heavy copper body are doing their job in sucking the heat from the CPU, but it looked as though the tight fin pitch was inhibiting the heat from being properly dissapiated once it had been absorbed.


The same was true for AM2+ testing. The heatsink became very hot and produced average performance figures. The idle delta T of 19°C was below average and the load delta T of 39°C was about the best result we'd seen from the CoolAge HSF. Sadly, this isnt going to help it to be recommeded as many other coolers can hit better delta Ts for less money and - you guessed it - they ship with a fan too. The Titan Fenrir for example costs about £30 and will produce a delta T of 37°C when the fan speed on low.

Conclusion

We're sorry to report that there are very few good things to say about the CoolAge X120TF. The mounting brackets feel cheap and the thread was gone in one of the screws to point where we could barely get it on. The thermal paste was just about solid enough to make stop motions animation with and there is no fan as standard.

As far as HSFs go, installation isn't the most painful, but the backplate means you'll need to remove the motherboard first if you dont have a chassis with a corresponding cut-out in the motherboard tray. The performance numbers, which are thoroughly middling. The lack of a fan isn't ideal, especially as the HSF doesn't perform well with a fan that other coolers do work with - you'd need to make sure you're adding a high CFM fan, and that in turn, is going to be noisy.

It's also extremely hard to score this product as despite repeated requests, CoolAge have yet to let us know how much the cooler with cost in either the UK or the US; prices on Korean websites seem to indicate it's about £25-30 over in the Far East, and given what you'd expect to add on for VAT and the cost of import, you'd probably be looking at £30-£35 over here, plus the cost of a fan.

All of which is to say, despite its interesting design tweaks, the X120TF isn't a contender and our recent favourite coolers - the Fenrir and the Tranquillo - both remain better buys.

• Features
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• 5/10

• Performance
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• 6/10

• Ease of Use
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• Overall
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• 5/10

Score Guide