A Comparison of 34 Coolers for the AMD Athlon XP

Unusually Bad But Extremely Quiet: TTC-D5 TB

Its cooler profile is identical to that of the TTC-D5T. It also has a copper core and a similarly coated contact surface on the base. The cooler is temperature-regulated. The external thermistor has its niche in a tiny hole in the cooler's base plate. The cooler's maximum fan speed is 3600rpm. The operating noise was barely audible, reaching a maximum of 40dB(A).

We were a bit shocked at the temperature level under the TTC-D5 TB: at full capacity, the temperature inside the CPU rose to 88° Celsius within a few seconds. Since we were sure we had mounted the cooler correctly and didn't want to sacrifice the processor, we discontinued the test. We discovered the reason for the miserable performance of our TTC-D5 TB after dismantling.

As can be seen from the photo, at less than a millimeter, the height of the groove of the TTC-D5 TB we were given to test did not conform to specifications. Apparently, we are dealing with a production error here. At any rate, the contact surface of a cooler designed in this way can have barely any contact or, in the worst case, no contact at all with the CPU in the socket. This also explains the unusually drastic temperature rise in the processor's die when it was measured. Pictured at the right of the photo, by the way, is the TTC-D5T, with a correct groove height of around two millimeters.

For this reason, it's only possible to speculate about the TTC-D5 TB's power. At full capacity, this cooler should be able to achieve die temperatures that hover just above 60° Celsius, since the thermal resistance should be somewhere between around 0.52 and 0.55 °C/W.

Since THG does not know whether faulty coolers found their way into stores, we recommend that would-be buyers check during purchase to see if the edge on the base indeed meets the prescribed minimum height.

Update: The cooler manufacturer Titan inadvertently sent us a prototype of this cooler that had the wrong dimensions. According to the manufacturer, the problems we found with this one definitely do not occur with models from the production line. A serial model with the correct dimensions has just arrived in the THG lab, which we will re-test as soon as possible.