3DVelocity would like to thank Swiftech and especially Gabriel Rouchon (Swiftech Founder, President, CEO) for their help and courtesy in providing this cooler for review.

Introduction :

With every passing week it's getting harder to choose from the massive range of heat sink and fan combos that seem to be flooding the market. Even as a tester it can be hard to gauge the advantages one cooler has over another when you've seen so many of them, so for the poor guy or gal on the street it must be like a minefield. From my point of view, performance had pretty much hit a brick wall with several coolers here sharing identical performance levels. Although we haven't been able to get hold of an SK6, the Thermosonic ThermoEngine with a non-stock 36CFM fan and the Zalman CNPS 5000+ were pretty much ruling the roost with solid performance levels that seemed almost invincible, at least amongst the units at my disposal.

When I first saw all the fuss being made over the Swiftech units it reminded me of the glowing reports that the Thermaltake Super Orb received before somebody bothered to test it properly and realised it was actually pretty average, so I didn't make a big effort to get hold of one. However, when I saw the follow-up MCX370-0A, and read about the steps Swiftech had taken to get better cooling from it, I realised just how committed they were to goals of top drawer cooling and knew this was one that we would have to get on the test bench. Without giving the game away too early, this is one cooler that slackens the lower jaw with its performance.

What you get :

I have no idea if this is the retail box or just a box used for review samples, but either way it's awful. You'd have no inkling from looking at it that the contents were of such supreme quality and it really doesn't do the product justice.

Okay, I'm done with the box now, so what's inside? Well, to begin with there's the cooler itself. Manufactured from high conductivity Aluminium and stinking of quality workmanship, you get the immediate feeling this isn't going to let you down. The fan is a 33CFM, 6800RPM Pabst which really seems to blast out the air and makes you wonder if the 33CFM rating is accurate, or maybe if other manufacturers are being a little "generous" with their CFM ratings. Unfortunately there's no tachometer (RPM sensing) on the fan, not that I'd risk it on a motherboard header anyway. I'd have also preferred to see a finger guard fitted considering the fan speed, but these things all drive up the cost, and I guess its not too difficult to add your own.

As you can see below, the power feed to the fan is ensconced in a black, braided sleeve that not only protects the wires, it also looks good under Neon through your side window. Finally comes a squeeze tube of good quality non-silicone grease and four Neoprene stabilisers for use when fitting to an Intel processor.

 

To protect the base from damage, a slab of expanded polystyrene is taped on when it arrives. As you'll see later, this is a wise move as that base has been machined flat, and I mean VERY flat.

Let's take a look at the specs before we move on.

 

Page 2 - A Closer Look >>>