The heatpipes lie in shaped grooves in the cooler base and the contact surfaces are all soldered together:

The thinnest part of the base below the heatpipes measures 3mm. Now the base surface is much better finished. Although it would be more correct to say that it simply became the best anyone could possibly ever make. Look:

Impeccable mirror! And it is also flawlessly even as our thermal compound imprint test showed on the glass surface as well as on the CPU heat-spreader:

The next item to discuss is the fan. Gradual transition of air-coolers to 140-mm fans is most likely inevitable. And Thermaltake BigTyp 14Pro is far not the first one here. Aerocool and Scythe have already used larger fans in their cooling solutions. However, BigTyp 14Pro has not just a plain 140-mm fan, but a fan that is 30-mm tall, as you can see from the specifications:

In fact, when we measured the diameter of the actual fan it was 129 mm and the effective blade depth was 25mm. However, this is just me nagging :) I believe I don’t have to tell you that the majority of 120 x 120 x 25 mm fans have even smaller blades. The fan rotation speed may be adjusted from ~1000 to ~1600 RPM with the noise level between 16 and 24 dBA. The maximum airflow in this case will be 85.76 CFM.

 Another peculiarity of this fan is that it uses no frame. And as you may already know frameless fans have one serious issue: low static pressure. And it is true indeed: the cooler specifications claim that its fan creates 1.6 mmH₂O pressure at its maximum rotation speed, which is not that much, actually. Here we have to once again mention the dense heatsink arrays, which don’t really go well with a low-pressure fan. However, let’s not speculate, as the tests later on will show if that solution works well or not.

There is a small sticker on the fan rotor. It indicated that this fan model TT-1430A was manufactured by Everflow Company well-known among overclockers for their wide range of fans:

The fan is built with a ball bearing with claimed 50,000 hours MTBF. According to the specifications, maximum fan power consumption is ~3.84 W (at 0.32 A current), although this value is different from what the sticker says: ~2.4 W (0.2 A).

The fan is connected to the three-pin plug on the mainboard and its rotation speed can be changed with a small regulator attached to the main cable:

It is not very convenient, because every time you need to increase the cooler efficiency you will have to open the system case to reach for the regulator, which is not always possible.

Summing up our discussion of the Thermaltake BigTyp 14Pro design we can’t help mentioning the highest overall assembly quality. We couldn’t find any flaws, no matter how hard we tried :)