You know I got to tell you .. I have a bit of a soft spot for heatpipe based CPU coolers. See, because I think next to water-cooling, they really are the best combination of low noise levels yet offer very favorable cooling. The downside obviously they can look a bit dull, are often somewhat large for the more aesthetically focused end-users among us. But cooling wise, yeah these little critters are just great.

Over the past month or six several new heatpipe based coolers where introduced onto the market. Today we pick five of these puppies and see where they are at noise and heat wise. And I already can disclose this .. not one single cooler was doing a below average result.

So for this test I decided to go a little more extreme. We'll crank up the usual system requirements a notch by using a fairly high-end PC as we take a Core 2 Duo Q6600 Quad Core processor and then overclock it to 3600 MHz to see how well these coolers still do.

We'll obviously show you a thing or two guided with photo's per brand. Speaking of brand's here are today's contestants (in random order)

• Noctua NH-U12P
• Coolink Silentator
• CoolerMaster Z600
• Tuniq Core Contact Freezer
• OCZ Vendetta 2

So that's a pretty interesting line of products to observe, monitor and test we figured. Have a look at the packaging and then head on to the next page please.