Thermalright Ultima 90 CPU Cooler Reviewed


 

Thermalright is a well known provider of quality thermal products and it's been awhile since we've taken a look at any Thermalright CPU Coolers here at DragonSteelMods so I'm happy to be bringing you the Ultima 90 for review today. The Ultima 90 is a now familiar heatpipe style CPU cooler, but what makes the Ultima 90 special is its size, compared to most other tower heatpipe coolers out there today this thing is tiny. So with this review I can finally answer the age old question: Does size matter?

Read on to find out…

Thermalright Ultima 90 CPU Cooler

Author: Kristofer Brozio

 

Sponsor: Thermalright

 

 

Tech Specs,Features or the Basic Info:


Thermalright Ultima 90 CPU Cooler

90mm body 120mm cooling power

Features:

* Six-heatpipe design for extra fast heat transfer

* Stepping fins to hold 92mm/120mm fans

* Light and easy installation

* High performance, low noise level at competitive price

Technical Spec:

* INTEL: All Intel Socket LGA775 processors

* AMD: Athlon64 / FX / X2 / Opteron Socket AM2 processors

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Processors Compatibility:

-Core 2 Quad and Core 2 Extreme Ready

-Socket AM2 Ready

Motherboard Compatibility:

-INTEL: All Intel Socket LGA775 processors

-AMD: Athlon64 / FX / X2 / Opteron Socket AM2 processors

**Socket 939 compatible with 939 Bolt thru kit , sold separately.

A Better Look at Things

:

If you're familiar with Thermalright products then you'll know that they come in very non-flashy boxes, in fact their boxes are just basically a brown box with very minimal labeling and descriptions.

Opening the box we find the Ultima 90 packaged in styrofoam and the parts in a box off to the side.

 

 

All of the parts included are in separate bags to keeps things sorted for you. Thermalright included a tube of their branded gray thermal compound but not their own Chill Factor thermal compound, why I'm not sure. Included with the mounting hardware is of course installation sheets, clips for 120mm and 92mm fans, silicone (or rubber) fan silencers that attach to the cooler and even a small wrench to help mount the Ultima 90.

 

  

  

 

The Ultima 90 itself sort of resembles the Thermalright Ultra 120, but obviously smaller in size. The construction is excellent, and an overall well designed product.

 

This is a heatpipe cooler so we've got heatpipes (imagine that eh?) that are I a U shape configuration that start and end at the top of the cooler.

 

The fins of the Ultima 90 are very closely spaced together, and there are 48 of them total.

 

On the top of the base of the cooler we find a hole this is used to mount the cooler, the cross bar has a bump in it that rests in the holes, the allows the cooler to rotate as well if need be to fit in your setup.

 

The base itself is nicely done, polished to a mirror finish with very faint machining lines visible if you look closely and it appears to be flat.

 

  

  

 

Installation, Testing and Comparison

Installation is fairly easy, but does require quite a few small parts:

 

The motherboard backplate is meant to be used for all of the platforms the Ultima 90 is compatible with so you have to actually assemble the backplate for your system. Easy to do, locate four female threaded standoffs and attach them to the backplate in the proper holes for your motherboard configuration. They lock into the backplate and are fastened with rubber o-rings, the o-rings act as insulators as well against the back of the motherboard.

 

  

You attach the backplate to your motherboard at the same time you attach the CPU mounting brackets to the front side. It's a bit a pain to do this, you almost need another hand really to hold everything together on the front and back while screwing in the screws.

 

 

The Ultima 90 itself is very easy to attach, just two spring loaded screws and a mounting bar are all that is used.

 

Being the Thermalright Ultima 90 is rather small I ran into no problems with it fitting in my system, and there were no clearance issues around it either.

 

I tested the Ultima 90 without a fan and with a Noctua NF-P12 120mm Fan, the fan is much large than the cooler.

 

 

Here's a quick comparison shot to show you the size of the Thermalright Ultima 90 compared to other similar CPU coolers on the market today and the Intel Stock Cooler. In the picture, from left to right: Coolink Silentator, Thermalright Ultima 90, Scythe Ninja Copper, Noctua NH-U12P and of course the Intel Stock Cooler down in front.

My test setup consists of:

-Intel P4 Extreme Edition 955 CPU @ 3.46GHZ

-Gigabyte GA-G33M-DS2R LGA775 Motherboard

-Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR2 PC2-8500 (2x1gig)

-Connect3d X1800GTO Video Card

-Ultra X3 800-Watt Modular Power Supply

-1x hard drive

-1x dvd/rw drive

-2x 120mm case fans, (1 intake and 1 exhaust)

-all housed in a Thermaltake Matrix VX case

Since I've just reviewed a few CPU coolers I figured I'd add them in the comparison chart as well as the Intel stock cooler. In the following chart you'll see results for the Thermalright Ultima 90 without a fan, with a Noctua NF-P12 120mm fan, the two GlacialTech Coolers I just reviewed, the Noctua NH-U12P I recently reviewed, and the Coolink Silentator.

Ambient temperature during testing was approximately 20C. It's nice doing testing of these types of products in the winter months as it's much easier for climate control… Load was achieved using Orthos Stress Prime.

I was very surprised by the small difference between idle and load temperatures without a fan on the Ultima 90, and as you can see with the addition of the 120mm fan the performance of the Ultima 90 is very good.

As a side note here, the temperatures you see above were using the thermal compound that came with the cooler, I try and use what comes with the coolers as that is what someone will get when they buy the product and I'd like to show what the average buyer might expect in terms of out-of-the-box performance. If you read my review I posted of the Noctua NT-H1 thermal compound you'll know that I used this cooler for all of those tests, and you'll notice the temperatures were lower than what you see here even while at the same ambient room temperature, so obviously you can get a bit more performance out of the Ultima 90 just by using a better thermal compound. The temperature differences were not drastic, just two degrees lower but two degrees cooler is still two degrees cooler and that might mean the difference in an overclock that you are trying to get… but even with the stock thermal compound the cooler performs admirably well especially for it's small size…

Overall as you can see the Ultima 90 is a great CPU cooler, the only problem I could find or others might find is the lack of a fan coming with the heatsink. Personally it doesn't bother me as I have many lying around that I can use, but someone else might not… I do like the idea of including two different sizes of fan clips so you have a choice of which size fan you'd like to use.

Summary:

As you can see size doesn't matter, the design and implementation are what matters the most when it comes to CPU cooling. The Thermalright Ultima 90 might be small but it features big performance when it comes to cooling your hot CPU, it easily competes with coolers that are twice its size.

As you saw from my tests the Ultima 90 is a great choice for a cooler especially if you are limited on space. Of course your results will vary on the brand and size of fan you use, but the Noctua fan I choose for my testing is a very good choice overall.

DragonSteelMods gives the Thermalright Ultima 90 CPU Cooler a 5 out of 5 score and our Recommended Award as well.

Pros:

-Small size

-Well made

-Looks great

-Excellent performance

-Fairly easy installation

-Includes mounts for 120mm or 92mm fans

-Can be used without a fan

Cons:

-None really…

I would like to thank Thermalright for the chance to review the Ultima 90 and for their continued support of DSM.

Discussion or questions HERE

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