Swiftech Polaris 120 Heatsink
Mar 28th, 2011 | By JaredManufacturer:
Swiftech has been around since 1994 and a large part of their history involves developing thermal solutions for high end PCs. Going back to the first days of the AMD Athlon and Pentium 4 processors Swiftech was a name often brought up when it came to high end air cooling. Over the years Swiftech air cooling market has been largely OEMs while their consumer focus has largely been their successful water cooling products.
Today Swiftech is looking to make an entry once again into the consumer air cooling market with their new Polaris 120 tower style heatsink. The Polaris 120 is a dramatic shift for Swiftech from their patented Helicoid technology and is their first tower style heatsink.
Looks like a great cooler! I used to run the CM Hyper212+ and know from experience that any cooler that can beat it out is a worthy contender! It would have been nice to see some other coolers compared, but that’s OK, at least the CMH212+ is a good reference point. Honestly, I didn’t read >every< word of the review, so I may have missed it, but it doesn't look like the Polaris120 can use two fans in a push/pull arrangement…. can it?
OOOPS! I wanted to add that I >>really<< like the spacing (or lack thereof) of the heatpipes on the cooler's base. There's almost no "dead space" between the pipes which probably explains why it's such a good cooler!
“Looks may be suggestive but the Polaris 120 certainly is an eye pleasing design in my opinion.” Don’t you mean “subjective”?
Why would there be heatpipes NOT directly over the cpu?
Is the fan 120mmx25mm or 120mmx20mm? If 25mm thick then a 20mm thick fan may save the 1st memory slot with a little tweaking of the fan clips. I can’t quite tell by your, very nice, photo’s.
According to the, as usual, excellent drawing by Swiftech, if the distance from the middle of your cpu to the side of your memory in the 1st memory slot is 1.8″ (45.5mm), or less, there would be no conflict with this hsf.
Isn’t 41.5 dBA a little loud for a single fan solution? Using a higher airflow PWM fan, with the speed turned down in the BIOS, should render this hsf virtually silent.
This was a very good review. Keep up the good work!