Thermaltake shows off a fan shaped fan

ONE THING ABOUT trade shows is that certain categories of products stand out, and this time around heatsink/fans were certainly one of them. HSFs were on display at the Thermaltake booth at CeBIT along with a ton of other things.

The one that made everyone sit up and take notice is the V1 fan. It really puts the fan back in HSF, and also puts the shiny copper back as well. These things are big, fan shaped, and shiny. Everyone was looking at them.

On the technical side, there is a 110mm fan stuck in the middle and four heat pipes running from the base to the fins. It has mounting brackets for AMD and Intel, and the only down side is a 3 pin connector, IE no variable speed fan. It is the top of the line part from Thermaltake right now.

Slightly below that we have the Max Orb, a shiny titanium/silver monster in the classic Thermaltake Orb shape. This one has an LED in the center as well. One model below that is the Blue Orb, it is about half the size of the Max, and is a pretty standard fan in the middle of the HSF design. The trick? Blue anodization and LEDs that write messages on the spinning fan.

It wouldn't be Thermaltake without big PSUs, and they were not hiding there. The PSUs we told you about during CES are here, with a bigger display of 1000, 1200 and 1500W toughpower models. They also had something called the PowerExpress, a 450 or 650W supplementary PSU that fits in drive bays. This PSU provides power for the monster GPUs that are coming.

That brings us to a product that I am not sure I quite get, the NB Cool T3000 laptop pad. Unlike the USB and fan laden monsters of yore, this is a simple metal plate with ribs on the back. Between the ribbed for your pleasure ribs, there are a bunch of heat pipes.

So, why the mild skepticism? I understand the point, to distribute heat along the entire pad for cooling and to avoid hot spots. The problem? Is there really that much heat to distribute? I don't doubt it works, but is it needed over a metal plate backed with rubber?

That brings us to the last of their line, the high end of the home theater cases. The difference between the DH104 and the DH103 is the 104 has a 7" screen in front. It is a sideshow part, so you need Vista and the attendant DRM infection to make it work, but it should provide you with a readout during media center usage. Other than that, they are just a very large media center case with a plethora of buttons on the front and a nice silver finish.

There was a lot more at Thermaltake, almost everything was refreshed or updated. PSUs had new ranges, HSFs were enlarged, and cases got a few new features. If you like their stuff, it is probably worth it to peruse their site to see what changed. µ