Summary: Tacens sent us a really compact notebook cooler this time. After having reviewed the Tacens Fero I was eager to test something more portable, which could fit in my notebook bag. This first attempt at a portable notebook cooler by Tacens, does however leave me wanting more.

Tacens is a young company, they started their business in 2005, but they have grown quickly and taken their place in the computer accessory market. Some of their new products this season are their notebook coolers; Fero, Trio and Fero Light. Three different approaches to the same problem; high heat emitting laptops.

INTRODUCTION

After having reviewed the Tacens Fero, it is time to take a closer look at the much smaller Trio. The Trio wants to be an efficient and quiet notebook cooler, the keywords are portability and lightness, something that clearly separates it from its big brother Fero.

My first impressions of the Trio were good, I liked the different angles and forms it can take. Let’s look at the specifications:

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

We recognize the design of the box from the other Tacens products we have reviewed. It goes in black and white, with descriptions of the product in seven languages.

Inside the box we found the Trio protected by bubble plastic. In addition to the product itself, we found the the cable and a simple manual that describes the function of the Trio.

IN DETAIL: TACENS TRIO

Like the Tacens Fero, the Trio is made of plastic ABS with a leather finishing which adds to its smoothness and style.

The Tacens Trio has two hinges fastened to the central triangle that allows it to adopt several different positions. It’s the versatility of the Trio that allows it to take different forms and have different functions. When the cooler is unfolded it can be used as a notebook cooler and when it’s unfolded it can be used as an ordinary desktop fan. There is no great mystery on how to use this product as a desktop fan, just connect it to an USB port an put the fan on you desk in a position you like and there you go.

However, the main purpose of the Tacens Trio is to work as a laptop cooler. So let’t take a look at the most important characteristics of the Trio. The Tacens Trio is built around two Tacens Dawn Pro 60mm fans, identical to the fans on the Tacens Fero. The Tacens Fero however, has four if these quiet fans.

The underside of the Trio is not much to talk about. It has some rubber anti-slippers to secure it to the surface it is placed upon. It also has drop down lifters which you can see on the picture below, to enable a higher angle and some ergonomics. Compared to the four settings available on the Tacens Fero, this is not much and leaves us stuck with only two possible positions with little variation.

The dimensions and small weight are what truly makes the Tacens Trio special. I have never before seen a notebook cooler with these characteristics. It’s light and small and fits in my laptop bag and will become a regular companion on my trips. In spite of its small dimensions, the Trio can be used with bigger laptops as well.

INSTALLATION AND TESTS

The installation of the Tacens Trio only requires you to connect one end of the cable to the connector on the notebook cooler and the other and to a free USB port on your laptop. As simple as that, no extra power adaptor needed.

To realize the actual testing of the Tacens Trio we used a laptop with the following specifications:

• Intel core 2 duo T7300 (2x2Ghz)
• Intel GM965 (Intel X3100)
• Toshiba MK1637GSX (160GB, 5400rpm, 8MB cache)
• Kingston HyperX 5300 CL4 (2x1GB, 4-5-5)

To measure the temperatures, we used the software “Everest 3.5″. We setup two different scenarios; “full load” and “idle”. The full load scenario means we pushed the system to max load for 20 minutes with the software Cinebench 9.5. The idle scenario means we just left the notebook doing nothing at all for 20 minutes, just being idle in Windows XP, which we used as operating system for both scenarios. The results are the shown in the graph below.

As you can see from the graph the values obtained by the Tacens Trio are very poor. We noticed almost no temperature drop at all either at full load or idle mode. It only managed to cool the CPU and HDD one tiny degree (centigrades) during the full load scenario. The most probable reason for the poor cooling performance has to be that the fans maximum rotation speed is only 1500 RPM. Because Tacens did not include a potentiometer, we were not able to boost the speed of the fans which would perhaps have helped the performance a bit.

The noise generated by the Tacens “Dawn Pro” fans is not much to talk about, they are really quiet.

CONCLUSIONS

While Tacens have succeeded in constructing a very portable and quiet notebook cooler, they have failed on its most important characteristics; the cooling performance. I still like the idea of this product, but one can not neglect that the Trio fails to impress me overall, it just doesn’t dissapate heat as much as it should. It scores some points for design and portability but falls short on its cooling performance.

The final score is 60 out of 100 owls.

Check out hundreds of other cool Notebook coolers and stands at TestSeek.com.

We especially recommend you to check out the most popular coolers for the moment:

• Zalman ZM-NC2000
• ThermalTake iXoft Notebook Cooler
• Cooler Master Notepal Infinite
• Cooler Master NotePal X1
• NZXT Cryo LX
• Antec Notebook Cooler 200

Author: Manuel González Fernández

Translator: Vince Emiloz Sanderson

Summary: The Nexus TDD-9000 is a bold and innovative product that promises great advantages compared to traditional coolers for portable computers.

We’ve tested many cooling systems for laptops. In general, they all depend on active cooling from fans. Although they’re generally quiet, they also consume a large amount of electricity. Nexus has given us a very innovative cooler for portables. We’re sure it will impress you as much as it impressed us.

INTRODUCTION

The Nexus TDD-9000 is more than just a cooler. We’d call it an advanced cooling system, which uses gel to do its work.

Let’s start by looking at the TDD-9000′s features:

• Cools by using a patented liquid
• Finished in black velvet
• Completely silent: 0 dB!
• Doesn’t use electricity
• Universally compatible
• Light, foldable, and easy to carry, weighing only 500 grams (17.6 ounces)
• Dimensions: 400 x 290 mm (15.7 x 11.4″)

As a cooling system, the TDD-9000 is certainly a bit strange. But we also recognize that it’s truly innovative and is definitely worth a look.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

The Nexus TDD-9000 cooling pad comes in a large, but very practical bag, which lets you see the product. The packaging briefly describes the TDD-9000 and promises to lower your portable computer’s temperature by up to 17ºC (62.6ºF).

The back of the package explains some of the product’s features in detail. It includes two graphics with the results that an independent lab obtained in its performance testing. The graphics say it all — if we could get only half the promised improvement, we’d celebrate!

A DETAILED LOOK AT THE NEXUS TDD-9000

It’s time to take a close look at the TDD-9000, so we’ll take it out of its protective plastic shell. The first thing we noticed (you can’t help it!) is the very pleasant feel of the pad’s 100% velvet cover.

When we heard that the TDD-9000 was filled with gel, we thought it would be pretty rigid. But it’s totally moldable, as you’ll see in the images above and below, where we bend and fold it. If you’re short on space, no problem — you can fold it and put it in a small box, or even fold it into a ball.

The TDD-9000 is made of excellent material. You can see that in the Nexus logo in the lower left corner. We were afraid of tearing the pad, which could cause a serious problem if the gel leaked out. But the materials are very good, and the pad as a whole should be very resistant.

TESTING THE NEXUS TDD-9000

To test the TDD-9000 we used tools based on Intel’s Santa Rosa platform: a Core 2 Duo T7300 with a 965GM chipset, X3100 graphics, and a Toshiba MK1637GSX hard disk. Our laptop has a 15.4″ screen. When we put it on top of the TDD-9000, we saw that the pad is large enough to accommodate even larger laptops. I’d venture to say that you wouldn’t have problems even with a 17″ screen.

For our temperature tests, we used the CINEBENCH R10 benchmark, which let us simultaneously exercise the processor, chipset, and graphics card. Here are the results:

Our results were far from the improvements certified by the Taiwanese test lab. But they were appreciable. Even a reduction of 2ºC (3.6ºF) is welcome in a portable computer. We also noticed that we didn’t get any noise reduction benefit, as we did when we tested cooling units that used fans.

I was pleased that I had no problem keeping the computer on my lap when I used the TDD-9000, even for long periods of time. The bottom of the pad was always cold. It seems that by using the TDD-9000, we can finally use a laptop in bed to watch movies or to work in a relaxed state, with nothing to bother us.

CONCLUSIONS

The Nexus TDD-9000 is definitely a novel and impressive, even bold product. That’s the only way to make a name for itself in the market.

As a cooling pad, the TDD-9000 has many virtues, such as its excellent materials, good feel, lightness, and easy storage (even in pant pockets). At first, we had great hopes for its ability to lower temperatures. While those benefits ended up being much smaller, we think they may be adequate.

Something else that caught our attention was that the TDD-9000 doesn’t reduce a laptop’s fan noise, something that does improve with active coolers. But we also realized that when we used this pad, we could put the computer on our lap without being bothered by the heat.

In short, Nexus has done a good job with its TDD-9000. If it can somehow improve the pad’s performance, it will have an excellent product. It’s available at several places for as low as $25.

The final score is 75 out of 90 owls, which is 83.3 out of 100. We give the “Nexus TDD-9000 Laptop Cooling Pad” our Recommended Award.

Thanks to Nexus and ThunderIT Ibérica for letting us test the TDD-9000.

Author: Manuel González Fernández

Translator: Ed Winograd

Summary: Tacens has entered the market for graphic card heatsinks in the best possible way. Its Visio is a solution with excellent compatibility and very good performance, all at a very reasonable price.

Tacens is an old friend of ours. We’ve seen many products from this manufacturer: power supplies, cases, and panels. But up to now, we haven’t had the chance to examine any of its heatsinks. In general, they are highly regarded, especially for their silent operation.

INTRODUCTION

This heatsink, along with being the first one from Tacens that we could test, is the first one they’ve designed. The market for graphic card coolers is complex, because good performance is necessary and products must have almost universal compatibility. Tacens is a young company. Given that this is its first baby step in this area, we’ll have to see if they’ve done their work well.

We still haven’t said the name that Tacens has given its heatsink: Visio. We can draw many conclusions from such a striking name, but it would be better to see the specifications that Tacens has provided for the Visio:

The use of such unconventional bearings caught my attention. It’s welcome because it offers various advantages (we’ll talk about those later). It also allows for universal compatibility, since normally, certain video cards are only supported by heatsinks specially designed for them, like the HD 2900XT.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Tacens’ presentation of the Visio perfectly demonstrates the company’s general sense of esthetics: black packages illustrated with images of the product. But in this case, we can directly see the product itself, rather than an image of it. The back of the package describes the unit’s most important features in various languages, as well as giving the technical specifications in English.

When we open the package, the first things we find are the accessories that Tacens includes with the Visio: a 2-page instruction manual, 8 aluminum heatsinks with thermal paste for VGA memory, and everything needed to install the product on any graphics card.

A DETAILED LOOK AT THE TACENS VISIO

The idea behind the Tacens Visio is very simple. But keeping in mind that it’s universally compatible, we realize that an enormous amount of work has gone into it. It’s fairly big, which means it will cover almost the entire PCB of most graphics cards.

Tacens has given the Visio aluminum fins with an irregular profile, much as Zalman does in its designs. This increases the transfer of heat to the environment. The fins are quite rigid. This is good, because you often come across fins that are so thin that they easily bend and break.

The heart of the heatsink is composed of 4 copper heatpipes 6 mm (0.24″) in diameter. Along with the aluminum plate in which they’re embedded, they form the unit’s base. We liked the good finishing that Tacens has given the Visio’s base. It’s very uniform, something you don’t always see in this type of base. However, they haven’t given it a mirror finish. The heatsink’s anchors protrude from the base, so when you install it, you only have to position it in the right place on the GPU and screw it in.

The Visio’s fan is fairly large – 80 mm (3.15″). It combines good cooling with silent operation. Tacens has provided two options for powering it, using either a Molex connector or a 3-pin connector.

The fan’s most notable specification relates to its rifle bearings. They’re an evolution of the traditional roller bearings and provide better life expectancy and less operating noise.

INSTALLING AND TESTING THE TACENS VISIO

To test the Tacens Visio, we used a Gigabyte Radeon HD 4850, a card that runs fairly hot with its reference design cooling. To install the Visio, we only had to install the memory heatsinks, apply the thermal paste, and screw in the heatsink. It couldn’t have been easier.

For both tests in which we measured temperatures, we used the GPU-Z utility. To load the card to the max, we used the Furmark 1.7 Stress Test, which we let run for 30 minutes. The results were as follows:

The Tacens Visio’s results are very good. It kept a Radeon HD 4850 within good limits, while working very silently. Tacens has done an excellent job with the Visio. It hit the mark by using direct touch heatpipes and rifle bearings.

CONCLUSIONS

Our analysis shows that Tacens has done an excellent job with the Visio. We can say this for two main reasons: it is almost universally compatible and offers very good performance.

The Tacens Visio is a simple and robust heatsink, which thanks to its 4 direct touch heatpipes and ultra-quiet fan will make our environment very pleasant, while keeping our video card out of trouble.

The Tacens brand has distinguished itself by offering economical products. The launch of the Visio hasn’t changed this. You can find it for about 25 Euros ($35), which is quite a steal!

The final score is 92 out of 100 owls and we give the “Tacens Visio Heatsink” our Editor’s Choice Award.

Thanks to Tacens and BIOMAG for letting us test the Visio.

Author: Manuael González Fernández

Translated by: Ed Winograd

COOLINK GFXCHILLA Heatsink, Cooling Down Our Hardware

Coolink has been making inroads in the market for PC heatsink components. It now seeks to impress us with a cooling system for the least-cool part of a computer, the GPU. Let’s see how its new entry checks out.

THE COOLINK GFXCHILLA AND CHILLARAMIC: “COOLING DOWN OUR HARDWARE.”

Introduction

Coolink International Corporation was established in 1996. It specializes in refrigeration and is well known in the industry. Through the years, Coolink has designed and manufactured many high-performance heatsinks. Headquartered in Taiwan, it decided to explore new markets, bringing its products to Europe in 2005. The company stands for performance, excellent quality, and very attractive prices.

Today, Coolink is growing significantly worldwide. Its division that produces products to cool PC components has grown substantially, along with its sister company, Noctua. It is increasingly introducing new products for various types of hardware. One of these is the GFXChilla, a high-performance heatsink for video cards, which takes up only one PCI slot, providing maximum performance in a small space. One important requirement for a heatsink to perform well is the thermal paste that is added to conduct heat to it. Knowing this, Coolink has made a ceramic thermal paste to compete in this market, which it calls Chillaramic.

First Look

The GFXChilla is a high-performance heatsink that only takes up one slot, in addition to the one occupied by the video card. It features four powerful high-performance heatpipes made from pure C110 copper (chrome-plated annealed copper) to transfer heat better. They are connected by a 39mm² square (0.06 square inch) sheet of pure C110 copper, which is also the base that makes contact with the video card’s GPU chip. On the other side of the heatpipes are 65 well-placed and well-soldered aluminum fins that support two high-performance fans (80mm L x 10mm W, or 3.1″ L x 0.4″ W). Thanks to their bearings, they are very silent (Coolink’s fans have generally been extremely quiet, with excellent airflow).

The GFXChilla’s packaging is good. In front, we can see the two blue fans, with the heatsink underneath them. The back of the package displays the unit’s specifications and measurements in a way that gives a good general idea of the product.

The GFXChilla comes with various accessories, which covered all of our video cards’ cooling needs. These include 6 standard RAM heatsinks, 4 low-profile RAM heatsinks, 4 large voltage regulator heatsinks, 4 small voltage regulator heatsinks, thermal paste, mounting screws, a 4-pin voltage adaptor, tape to protect the GPU, and a user’s manual.

We should also note the benefits of Coolink’s Chillaramic thermal paste. It combines high performance and ease of use, because its ceramic nanoparticles achieve high heat transfer. It also doesn’t conduct electricity, unlike other thermal pastes. It comes in a highly visible package in which you can easily see the 10 grams of Chillaramic paste, as well as some of its specifications and advantages.

Installation

Installing the GFXChilla is a snap, requiring only a Phillips screwdriver. Remove the thermal tape that protects each memory heatsink. The GFXChilla comes with the necessary screws (depending on the video card). Cover your video card’s adjustment holes with the included plastic washers. Then insert the Phillips nuts that come with the GFXChilla, and you’re done.

Test Setup

Tests:

3D Ozone Furmark V 1.6.5

Far Cry 2

We let the 3Dozone FURMARK version V 1.6.5 benchmark run for one hour to apply significant graphic stress to the Foxconn 9800GT OC Edition GPU and provide a stiff test for the GFXChilla and the Chillaramic thermal paste. The results are shown below.

We played video games for one hour to verify the effect on the temperature.

We ran the Chillaramic test with a C2D E8500 processor and Swiftech Apogee GTX waterblock. The block was placed on the processor with three different thermal pastes:

Chillaramic

Noctua NT-H1

Arctic Silver Ceramic

Results

In general, the Coolink GFXChilla performed quite well in competition with one of the best VGA heatsinks on the market, the Zalman VF1000Cu. One strong point for the GFXChilla is the very low sound level generated by its two fans. Even at the highest RPM, no sound was perceptible, while the Zalman VF1000Cu is very noisy at all RPM levels.

The GFXChilla with Chillaramic thermal paste is a great combination, which even surpassed the Zalman VF1000Cu with Noctua NT-H1 thermal paste.

There’s nothing more to say about the thermal paste comparison. The Chillaramic ranks very highly. Sometimes we tend to forget how important having the right paste can be.

Conclusions

GFXChilla

The Coolink system performed its thermal dissipation task very well on our hardware. It’s very pleasant to be able to rely on a new brand for this important function.

The GFXChilla impressed us with the its advantages over the competition: excellent heat dissipation and transfer, its size and design, and its effective and extremely quiet ventilation system. It’s a welcome addition to the marketplace.

The final score is 98 out of 100 owls and we give the “Coolink GFXChilla Heatsink” our Editors Choice Award.

Chillaramic

We were astonished by the heat transfer effectiveness of the Chillaramic thermal paste. It’s even more impressive because it equals the performance of the competition from the largest players in this market.

The final score is 100 out of 100 owls and we give the “Coolink Chillaramic Thermal Paste” our Editors Choice Award.

Translated by: Ed Winograd

Written by: Jorge Alberto Corona

SunBeam is a Chinese company that specializes in making accessories that make computers look better and that improve their cooling systems. It has experienced incredible growth in its cooling business. One example of this is its Core-Contact Freezer.

One would think that an add-on heatsink for PC processors that promises to do an incomparable cooling  job and is made by one of the main producers of modding accessories might be more like a fashionable accessory than a product for achieving better performance. But we’ll see later that this isn’t true of Sunbeam and its mepowerful Core-Contact Freezer.

First Look

The front of the package shows the physical features of the Core-Contact Freezer, for example, how the heatpipes are part of the contact area at the base of the heatsink.

The back of the package has a list of the main features, and details about the solution that Sunbeam offers.

Here, we can see the contact area at the bottom of the heatsink’s base, with its 4 heatpipes.

Unfortunately, the lapping work isn’t the best. It’s far from the quality of other similar products. We can see that the little animal figure is barely reflected in the surface of the base of the Core-Contact Freezer. This is something that we could improve on ourselves and therefore achieve greater performance.

Here, we can see the entire Core-Contact Freezer. It has a very common tower design for its modern high-performance heatsinks.

The rest of the package contents are simple, but attractive. Its anchoring system is extremely easy to affix. Sunbeam has not only given us a speed regulator for the fan, but has also added a thermal paste well known for its performance, TX-2.

Specifications

Hardware

- Memory: 2 x 1 GB Corsair Dominator DDR 800

- Processor: Intel Q9550 (2.8Ghz @ 3.6 Ghz )

- Motherboard: Gigabyte EP45 UD3P

- Heatsink: Coolink Silentator

- Hard Disk: Western Digital Raptor SAA 150GB

- Power Source :Antec Quattro 1000W

- Video Card: ATi Diamond HD3870 Viper Ruby Edition 512MB

Software

- Prime 95

- CoreTemp

Methodology

After one of the heatsinks was installed and the temperature was read in the IDLE state, the Prime 95 program was used with the Blend test to take a second temperature reading after 20 minutes, to find the temperature at Full Load. This was repeated, using overclocking for each of the heatsinks.

Results

As you can see, the results are reasonable, especially because we’re in a time when there’s a lot of heat. While the Coolink Silentator had a slight advantage while the system was in the IDLE state (when no program was running), when the system was under Full Load, the Sunbeam Core-Contact Freezer gained ground and pulled ahead of its competitor. This is best seen when the system is overclocked. The Core-Contact Freezer did a better job of handling the heat generated by the 3.65 Ghz processor, greatly surpassing its Coolink competitor, by more than 5℃. That’s a considerable difference, one which could be increased with a better job of lapping.

Conclusions

At the end of our test, we saw the effect of having the heatpipes directly in contact with the processor. We also noted that the efficiency of heat absorption went up as processor speed increased. SunBeam has little experience in implementing heatsinks. Nevertheless, it obtained excellent results against a high-quality performance unit like the Coolink Silentator.

It’s worthwhile to note that it’s the inclusion of an excellent thermal paste, TX-2, that keeps this heatsink working efficiently for longer.

One point against the Core-Contact Freezer is that it may be incompatible with certain motherboards that have large heatsinks in the chipset area or around the mofsets, keeping the unit from coming in contact with them.

Another is the amount of noise generated. This can be very annoying after a while.

The cost is in the normal range for this type of heatsink, which varies from $45 to $60 at the time of this review.

The Sunbeam Core-Contact Freezer is an excellent and capable performer that can be modified with a low-RPM fan for those who are bothered by the noise it generates. It could also be improved by a better job of lapping.

The final score is 95 out of 100 owls, and we give the “Sunbeam Core-Contact Freezer” our Editor’s Choice Award.

Translated by: Ed Winograd

Written by: Jorge Alberto Corona