NZXT Respire T20 CPU Cooler Review

Like with the NZXT Respire T40, the T20’s older brother, the dominant aesthetic of the cooler is provided by the NZXT 120mm fan. This is just your standard 25mm wide 120mm fan that uses a 3 pin connection with a standard RPM of 1800. If that is too much for you then the provided low noise adapter will bring the RPM down to 1200 – a much quieter level. Black and white is a classic combo so you can’t really go wrong here.

From the bottom we can see this rather odd combination of heat pipes. Unlike most traditional CPU coolers where all the heat pipes are of uniform size, NZXT have opted for heat pipes of varying sizes. The central heat pipe is an 8mm copper heat pipe and the two outer heat pipes are 6mm. They all utilise direct touch technology which allows for more efficient heat transfer. There are some gaps in between the pipes, but they appear to be so small that the build up of thermal paste shouldn’t cause any performance issues.

From the top we can see just how thin this Respire T20 heat sink is. Although thickness isn’t necessarily the only measure of heatsink performance, fin spacing is another important aspect which can best be viewed from the side. The fan helpfully has an arrow pointing the direction of airflow and you can also see the fan clips which are very easy to attach and remove, not to mention they are also very sturdy too.

As you can see the fin density is actually very high. This means even the heat sink isn’t very wide, the high density of fins should still give thermal performance of a heatsink that would be wider than this. On the face of it this cooler looks like it will have low performance but if you examine things more closely it actually starts to look like it might be a decent performer.