Holiday Buyer's Guide 2007: Part 1

Zerotherm BTF95 CPU Cooler

by Tony Celeste

Looking for a cool way to cool down your hot running CPU? Zerotherm has the answer with its BTF95, a butterfly shaped, 100% copper heat sink which operates so efficiently that you can run it in complete silence with no fan. Of course, an optional fan is available, for those who enjoy pushing a dual or quad core processor to its absolute limits.

This copper butterfly isn't just good-looking, it's a great cooler, too.

The secret to the BTF95's remarkable cooling ability lies in its unique engineering, which features heat pipes instead of the traditional heat sink plus fan design. The Zerotherm BTF95's heat pipes contain a coolant fluid that pulls heat away from the processor, and allows the heat to evaporate harmlessly as it travels upward toward the top of the pipes. Once the evaporated coolant fluid reaches the top of the heat pipes, it's been cooled by its journey past more than 120 copper fins, which siphon heat from the heat pipes, and dissipate it safely, away from any key components. The coolant fluid then cools and falls back to the bottom of the pipes, where it once again extracts heat from the CPU, and begins another journey toward the top.

This infinite recycling process accomplishes the same goal as a fan pulling heat away from a processor, but without fan noise, and because heat pipes are a closed system, there's no need to ever add more coolant. In addition to being noiseless, there's another important advantage to a fanless CPU cooler: you'll never need to worry about your expensive CPU being destroyed because your CPU fan decided to stop working.

The Zerotherm BTF95 is available for $51.95 to $59.99, and supports both Intel and AMD processors.

  • Mike-TH
    I know this is an old review, I just wanted to warn potential second-hand buyers that the fans in this case are simply crap. If the side panel is left on, my system overheats rapidly. I have seen it get to 80c in a short while when playing WoW. If the panel is left off, it stays under 65c.

    I have a stock i7-920 cpu, GTX-275 graphics and 6gb ram. a velociraptor 300g and 2 WD 2tb 7200rpm drives, along with a DVD-RW drive. Nothing fancy, nothing overclocked, nothing out of the ordinary.

    I bought a box of replacement fans that should help with cooling, once I get off my lazy bum and actually DO the replacing.
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