I have quite a bit of experience with Nmedia products, they make excellent HTPC enclosures and other accessories for HTPCs, as well as various computer accessories. Today for review I have their new IceCone CPU cooler made for HTPC systems. The IceCone is made to be quiet to satisfy the needs of an HTPC system by not adding any additional noise but keeping the CPU cool in the process. It not only looks cool but does a very good job of keeping the CPU cool and your system quiet. Read on to learn about the Nmedia IceCone...

Nmedia IceCone CPU Cooler

Reviewed by: Kristofer Brozio AkA Dracos

Sponsor: Nmedia

Tech Specs,Features or the Basic Info:

In term of "CPU Cooling", there are three choices in the market. Air Cooling; Heatpipe Cooling and Liquid Cooling. Liquid cooling is not mature enough to be widely adopted, including safety and pricing considerations. So, we focus on the other two choices.

In HTPC world, size does matter. So, our cooler must be living in a compact environment, but performing. We develop two top of the line HTPC Coolers base on the following aspects:

Air Cooling Design & Material: Copper is the #1 material choice in air cooling. Period. So, we used entirely pure copper heatsink on the ICECONE. What differentiates the ICECONE from the competitors is the shape. We know the heatsink bottom base gets all the heat from the CPU, so, we increased the bottom size significantly, that means the heat will be consumed by the heatsink more efficiently. At the mean time, we lowered the heatsink height, so that the heat will be blown out faster by the CPU fan.

Air Cooling Fan: The bottleneck is the noise. If we use 120mm fan for the silent, users may have the interference issue in most of the HTPC cases. If we used 80mm or smaller size fan, the performance will be an issue, and the noise due to the high speed spinning fan is completely unacceptable for HTPC users. So, we, again, went beyond the boundary, developed our own 100mm silent fan to achieve the balance of the silencing and strong performance.

Tooless Installation: We want our customers have no hassle to upgrade their coolers. We developed the easy clip design. No need to totally un-install your entire system to change the motherboard bracket and un-wiring all your cables. Simply use our intelligently designed universal bracket, push it in, and clip on the heatsink. You are able to do it in 5 minutes to upgrade your existing generic noise maker to this efficient and silent cooler.

Model: ICECONE

Support CPU Platform: AMD Socket 754 / 940 / 939 / AM2 and INTEL Socket LGA775 / 478

Dimension: 4.41” (L) x 2.56” (H) x 5” (W)* (112mm x 112mm x 65mm)

Weight: 25.2 oz / 713g

Heatsink Material: Pure copper

Fan: 100mm Dual ball Bearing- 100x100x25mm

Fan Speed: 2600RPM ± 10%

Noise Level: 18-28dBA ± 10%

Air Flow: 35.3-55.3 CFM

Thermal Resistance: 0.24~0.21

Support Processor: Intel 3.8 GHz / AMD 4800+ or higher

Note: * 5” width including the Clip Length. Not the heatsink width

Highlight:

-Innovative easy clip for easy installation

-Pure Copper material ensures excellent heat dissipation

-Enlarged heatsink base that maximum performance

-100mm fan that enables the best balancing performance on air flow/noise/fan speed/size

-Fan Speed Controller is included on a PCI bracket

Price $34.99 from NewEgg at time of Review