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The Cooler
We were very pleased with the Nero S’ offerings last month and we are hoping more of the same and better with the Venom. When we first looked over the cooler in all its glory, one couldn’t help but find similarities between it and Titan’s Fenrir with the same fin spacing, and four 8mm heatpipes arranged in the same order. If Akasa can match or better it, then they are on to a winner here.
The build quality of the cooler is well made indeed. Maybe not to the standard of Prolimatech’ Armageddon we reviewed earlier, but still up there. Each 45 high grade aluminum fin has been rounded off to remove any sharpen edges to safeguard the user.
What’s interesting to note is that the cooler seems optimized for push-pull rather than a single fan; thus the “Smart Design” Akasa state about the cooler. If you note the picture above and below, each side is different with one side shaped inwards towards the coolers heatpipes, and the other side shaped in a convex manner. We can only presume that this is to aid the airflow of the intake fan to push the air through the aluminum profiled fins effectively allowing the opposite fan to pull any straggling airflow more efficiently. The arrow slight dent along the coolers middle from top to bottom on the outside of the fins where the ‘pull’ fan would be positioned helps to eliminate any dead spots of air within the cooler closest to the fans bearing helping to shift the air out quicker. In contrast, the other side features an oval gap when the fan is mounted. This gap helps to centralize the airflow through the coolers fins and heatpipes enabling to push the airflow more effectively.
The base of the cooler features HDT (Heatpipe Direct Touch) Technology. We’ve reviewed many coolers featuring this very technology with the same worries before testing. In principle, HDT is great in respect that it may offer rapid heat transfer from the CPUs base through copper heatpipes to the radiator fins for the airflow to disperse the heat effectively, but In reality some coolers get it wrong whereby once mounted some heatpipes are in contact with the base more so than others, thus more heat being focused on one or two of the heatpipes more so than the others making them unable to cope in high demand situations.
Like the Nero S, Akasa have divided the four heatpipes with 3 aluminum separators all equally flat. This ensures that once mounted, the cooler is as flat as it can be and in good contact with the CPUs base ensuring optimum cooling efficiency. The four 8mm copper exposed heatpipes have been machined smooth, in fact the whole base has and is not convex at all.
The kit supplied is a joy to see. Not only do you get 8 bright yellow siliconized rubber fan mounts for easy installation to the heatsink with anti-vibration properties for quiet operation, but you also get mounting for not just Intel, but AMD also. It’s nice to see a high performance cooler support all major and current platforms out of the box. If you see below, this cooler features Akasa’ new mounting kit dubbed the originally titled, “Easy Select Kit”. I don’t think we need to tell you what it does. It does what it says on the tin and offers a very simple but effective mounting.
Moreover, you are supplied with one Venom 4-Pin PWM 120x25mm fan. This fan is part of the S-Flow family of new fans Akasa have developed. According to Akasa, they provide 30% more airflow than your standard 120mm fan. This is mainly down to the fan blade design as each blade has been shaped in such a manner to deliver strong centralized airflow with minimal resistance.
Once paired up with the Venom coolers airflow focused design, it should prove very fruitful when we see the results. Cooler aside, this fan is rated to spin from 600-1900RPM with a max airflow rating of 83.63CFM and a noise level between 6.9-28.9dB(A). These figures sound very promising especially backed with the bearing type used; HDB (Hydro Dynamic Bearings). These HDB use a dynamic pressure field and an anti-leak seal to maintain constant bearing lubrication and in turn can extend the fans lifetime up to 50,000 hours, and moreover lowers the fan noise both at low and high RPMs. Note, Akasa do not provide the second fan.
