Thermaltake NiC F4 CPU Cooler Review
Ryan Martin / 11 years ago
At stock we can see the Thermaltake NiC F4 is in a good location and is right where I would expect it to be, among a range of other similarly priced mid range coolers. Although that said it does struggle to break away from some cheaper single fan budget CPU coolers like the SilverStone AR01 and Evercool Venti which doesn’t exactly impress me.
Acoustics weren’t the best but they were certainly good for a dual fan cooler. Thermaltake’s provided fans aren’t super quiet but at PWM they don’t get very loud either.
Overclocking confirmed some of my earlier concerns with performance and as you can see at PWM speeds the NiC F4 fails to reach some single fan CPU coolers like the Venti and AR01. Indeed these results do look surprising but after several retests and remounts the results came back the same. I would of liked to see the NiC F4 perform at least 2 degrees better at PWM speeds, for me it is just lacking quite a bit of performance. At maximum speed you can see it made some ground on other coolers, shaving off an impressive 3 degrees.
Acoustics are similar at overclocked frequencies to stock and I can say again that they are good for dual fan CPU cooler. That said the maximum fan speed was very loud for just 1600RPM, so you really wouldn’t want to use that for 24/7 usage, but the results are there to see if you are interested. I found from using these fans that anything over 1150RPM can become irritable for 24/7 usage.