Thermaltake NiC (Non-Interference Cooler) Series C4 CPU Cooler Review

The aesthetics are dominated by the black and red fans with the black plastic shroud. I know a lot of people will already be put off by the plastic shroud, but for most people it won’t really matter especially if you don’t use a side panel window.

The supplied 120mm fans do 1000 to 2000 RPM but use only a 3 pin connection. The means fan control is not present through PWM or the motherboard but instead through an integrated fan speed control dial on the 3 pin fan cable. In my opinion this is a really awkward place to put it because if you want to change your fan speed you need to go inside your case to do it and that’s by no means practical.

From the side we can see more closely the plastic shroud design.

At the top the four 6mm heat pipes are clearly visible.

Unlike the NiC F4 the NiC C4 features a flat nickel plated copper base. In my experience these give better contact than direct touch heat pipe designs because there are no gaps in between heat pipes for thermal paste to build up and as a result they normally perform better.

The mounting design with the Thermaltake NiC C4 is very good. It uses a motherboard bracket mount system which is the easiest because you can secure the brackets and backplate to the motherboard separate of the CPU cooler and then secure the CPU cooler to it when everything else is sturdy. This has major ease-of-install advantages over the alternative method where you secure the brackets to the CPU cooler and secure the backplate to the bracketed CPU cooler all in one go, Scythe, Be Quiet and Reeven CPU coolers use that style of tricky mounting.

Below you can see that you get all the mounting brackets and hardware required for the install. Separate AMD and Intel manuals are provided and a tube of thermal paste.