Apack ZEROtherm Nirvana NV120 CPU Cooler

Date: November 27, 2007 - Author: Rory Buszka

If you're Apack, how do you surprise the rest of the cooling industry? Release a tower-style CPU cooler that doesn't look like a butterfly. The new ZEROTherm Nirvana NV120 is that cooler, and luckily, it impressed. Could the Nirvana NV120 be our newest air-cooling champion?

Introduction

Forced-air CPU cooling solutions have seen two major advancements over the past few years. The first advancement is the widespread use of heatpipes, closed tubes that contain reservoirs of liquid at low pressure, such that the application of heat at one end causes the liquid to vaporize and carry the heat from one end of the tube to the other. Capillary action within a sintered metal powder layer on the inner surface of the tube draws the fluid back to the heat source once it has condensed.

The other major advancement is the tower-style heatsink design, made possible in large part by heatpipe technology. Tower-style designs allow the use of enormous bodies of fins, placed directly within the PC's natural airflow path (diagonally upward and toward the rear). Thanks to the fact that the technology is simple to manufacture, tower-style heatsinks have experienced a proliferation in the last few years.

I've often passed over Apack's ZEROtherm tower-style heatsinks in the past because of their 'butterfly' shape - while charming, they're not exactly the effect I think a lot of enthusiasts are 'going for' when considering the aesthetics of their internal components. ZEROtherm's new Nirvana NV120 heatsink is something completely different, however, with its appealing stealth-bomber-shaped fin structure.

When we first received word of this cooler, it was under a nondisclosure agreement (NDA), which had us scratching our heads - why might a CPU cooler, of all things, be covered with an NDA? We suspect Apack wanted to 'spring' this cooler on the competition - for good reason, as we soon discovered. In this article, I'll be evaluating the ZEROtherm Nirvana NV120 both thermally and acoustically, to see what all the fuss is about.

The ZEROtherm Nirvana cooler comes packaged in a large, sturdy cardboard box with a front window, through which you can see the product itself. The cooler and included accessories are packaged in a PET shell. The box even has a carrying handle on the top for convenience.

The Nirvana package includes mounting hardware for Socket AM2 and LGA 775 motherboards, an adjustable fan controller, a packet of additional hardware, and a basic instruction manual, as well as the Nirvana cooler itself. The cooler had some slightly bent fins when I unpackaged it, but that's a minor quibble and could simply be a manufacturing issue.

Plated from head to toe in a striking 'black chrome' finish, the Nirvana is one seriously sexy piece of hardware that will complement a wide range of enthusiast gear. Its fin structure has 45 aluminum fins, which are fed by four double-ended copper heatpipes that pass twice through the body of fins, for approximately the effectiveness of eight heatpipes.

Closer Look, Installation

The fan itself, a clear, frameless 120mm, mounts to a metal bracket that attaches to the base. The fins feature a special design that causes them to cross each other and generate more turbulent airflow, which improves heat exchange effectiveness. The trailing fin edges that catch additional tangential airflow from the fan, a development that appeared in the older butterfly-shaped coolers, make an appearance here as well.

The black chrome plating on the copper base gives it a mirror-quality finish, which won't require any additional 'lapping' to improve the quality of the contact patch. The only treatment you'll need to apply is an ultra-thin layer of your favorite thermal compound. The retention mechanism of your choice will also need to be installed.

Thankfully, Apack has designed the ZEROtherm Nirvana's mounting clips to install in either a vertical or horizontal orientation, to suit any motherboard design. Because the fan on the Nirvana is large and powerful, it can have a significant effect on the airflow in your case - typically, front-to-back airflow is recommended, to encourage unimpeded natural convection and synergy with the ATX cooling scheme.

An adhesive-backed mounting plate for LGA 775 motherboards is also included, though these can be difficult to remove if you decide to install a different cooler later on down the line.

I had no problems mounting this cooler on the micro-ATX motherboard that serves as my heatsink testing platform, despite the fact that the spring clip is slightly less convenient than the flip-clip design that's also common. Though there were no clearance train-wrecks even on the cramped Micro ATX board, I did spot one close call - the tips of the Nirvana's fan blades pass within millimeters of the adjacent memory modules' heatspreaders. If you're using RAM with heatspreaders that have fins or heatpipes coming out the top, and you're making use of all four RAM slots, you may be out of luck with the Nirvana.

The Nirvana cooler comes with an adjustable fan controller as an accessory. With its relatively large and strangely-shaped casing, however, it's far less elegant than Zalman's very similar Fan Mate 2. Most newer motherboards already have provisions in their BIOS for controlling fan speed anyway, so you may not have much use for the controller.

I don't recommend using the controller in tandem with the automatic fan speed control that may be present on your motherboard, since this can lead to unpredictable effects and may prevent the Nirvana from reaching its performance potential.

Next, let's take a look at how the NV120 cooler fared on the heatsink testing platform - though I'm already confident the results will be excellent.

Testing, Final Thoughts

All heatsink testing at Techgage is performed with three considerations in mind: repeatability, accuracy, and comparison. In order to achieve these three aims, it's important to use a standardized testing platform for all measurements which are to be compared. In this case, the test platform is based around an AMD Athlon X2 "EE" model, which operates inside a 65-watt thermal envelope, similar to most Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs.

What's most important, however, is that the test platform be consistent in its operation, so that the thermal margins provided by each CPU cooler can be directly compared - since it's the proportional change that we really care about.

Test System
• CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ EE (65W)
• Motherboard: ASUS M2NPV-VM (nForce 430, GeForce 6150)
• RAM: 1GB (2x512MB) A-Data Vitesta DDR2-1000 @ DDR2-800
• Hard Drives: Western Digital 160GB, 7200RPM, 8MB Cache, SATA2
• PSU: OCZ StealthXStream 600W
• Other Hardware: Cooler Master iTower 930, modified

The test system is designed to simulate the airflow of a typical enthusiast PC, minus any extraneous heat loads provided by a separate GPU, massive hard drive arrays, et cetera. However, it seems that as CPU coolers continue to push the cooling envelope, and compact all-in-one watercooling solutions gain popularity, necessitating a greater heat load, the current test system may be pushed into obsolescence in the near future.

Before installing the cooler, a ball bearing-sized drop of Arctic Silver was spread into a thin layer using the sharp edge of a razor blade. During testing, Cool N' Quiet was disabled, as well as the board's "Q-Fan" smart fan control. The system was first allowed to reach a stable idle temperature for about 30 minutes before testing was performed. Then 3DMark 2006 was run with its default settings to load both cores, and the peak observed temperatures were recorded. Finally, the system was allowed to return again to a stable idle temperature, and the peak observed idle temperature was recorded.

Two things are apparent - first of all, with the Nirvana cooler, the CPU idles only a fraction of a degree from room temperature (18.5°C)! In addition, the Nirvana has a 27% advantage over the stock AMD cooler, and a 20% advantage over the recently-reviewed OCZ Vanquisher. I'd have no trouble believing the quoted 150+ watt dissipation capacity of the ZEROtherm Nirvana, and no qualms about using it on the fastest, hottest quad-core you can throw at it. This is excellent performance, any way you slice it.

The ZEROtherm Nirvana doesn't make huge claims of silence - with the motherboard's onboard smart fan control enabled, at idle the big 120mm fan didn't even spin up, but with the control disabled, the noise produced by the cooler was very noticeable. Throttling the fan down to its minimum operable speed, it was indeed silent. Without a doubt, the Nirvana cooler offers enough thermal horsepower on tap that you'll be fine to leave your CPU in its capable hands with thermal 'smart fan' control enabled.

And now for the wrap-up.

Final Thoughts

The Apack ZEROtherm Nirvana NV120 is the total package. It's got the trippy name, the seductive finish, the big fan complete with blue LEDs... but the real question is, does it cool? Heck yes it does! It kept the 65W CPU close to room temperature at idle, and only a shade above that under strenuous load. I suspect the head-to-toe black chrome plating did the trick, providing a super-smooth contact surface on the base. The clip was easy to install, and the accessory pack was comprehensive.

Now for the nitpicks, what few there were. First of all, this cooler is BIG. On the test platform, the fan blades came within millimeters of adjacent RAM slots - meaning that if you're on a particularly cramped motherboard and using all the available RAM slots, you may be out of luck if your RAM has tall heatspreaders. And, of course, there's that goofy-looking adjustable fan controller that's of dubious value. If you don't like blue LED lighting (for whatever reason), this cooler might also not be for you.

In the end, I'm willing to let the good points outweigh the bad and award the ZEROtherm Nirvana a Techgage score of 9/10. If you were considering the bulky, expensive Zalman CNPS9700LED, the ZEROtherm Nirvana provides an attractive alternative at last.

Pros
• Jaw-dropping frigid temperatures
• Attractive design and finish
• Easy to install
• Not shaped like a butterfly

Cons
• Large
• Noisy at full tilt

If you have a comment you wish to make on this review, feel free to head on into our forums! There is no need to register in order to reply to such threads.