Design and Functionality

Thermalright AXP-140 cooler measures 145 x 147 x 70.2 mm and weighs 550g.

Only when you take Thermalright AXP-140, you realize how well the cooler is built. An extremely dense array of aluminum heatsink plates sitting solidly on the heatpipes and soldered to them promise reliability and efficiency. The cooler is based on six copper heatpipes with 6mm diameter that go through a copper base:

Note that the heatpipes pierce the base plate through, and not come out of it, like we usually see by most “top-coolers”.

The heatpipes contact the heatsink plates twice. There are two groups, three heatpipes in each. They pierce the entire heatsink array with their one end, go through the base plate, then join together in one tight group and again pierce 42 heatsink plates in the center of the array:

So, the main thermal load will be distributed over the two groups of long heatpipes outside the fan dead zone. And the short heatpipes in the center of the heatsink should be dealing with a much smaller part of the heat flow, in my opinion.

There are 79 plates in the heatsink, each 0.32mm thick. The plates are spaced out at 1.2mm distance from one another. As a rule, heatsinks with such dense plate arrays are very sensitive to the efficiency of the installed fan and its static pressure. It may be not so evident for AXP-140, because its plates are only 25.5mm tall (and only 20mm in the center of the heatsink). Nevertheless, we are going to see how the cooling efficiency of Thermalright AXP-140 solution depends on the fan rotation speed and fan type. Here I would also like to add that the calculated heatsink effective surface area is 4782sq.mm (Thermalright SI-128 SE boasts 6786sq.mm).