Thermaltake Rotation shows its class

IF YOU WANT GOODIES at any trade show, Thermaltake is the place to go. The company tends to have more truly unique ideas per square foot of floor space then just about anyone else, from high end to low.

Xpressor cooling rig

Starting out at the high end was the Xpressor refrigerated case. It is a phase-change cooler (aka refrigerator) in a case, something that was the domain of specialty companies. It will be sold as a complete case plus fridge at the end of the year, price is yet to be determined. Thermaltake is claiming 20-30 degrees lower temps than water cooling without the usual condensing problems.

Necessary? No. Impressive? Yes.

The next one is far lower end, an active RAM cooler. Yeah, if you thought DIMM heatspreaders were unnecessary and heat pipes were comical, you will wet yourself laughing at the heatspreadered, heatpiped, and active fan-cooled DIMM thermal solution called the RamOrb. The arms race for memory cooling has officially reached the point of silly.

Rotation CPU cooler

Rotation is the name for this beast, and it is just a prototype. It is made by taking metal fins and rotating each a few degrees relative to the one before it. The end result is an amazing look that is by far the most elegant heatsink of Computex. I hope these make it into production soon, it is the best look on the market since the V-series 'fan' HSFs.

Cases are a hallmark of Thermaltake, and this year there were two new ones to note, the Spedo and Luxa lines. Spedo is case that separates the PSU, GPUs and CPUs into separate thermal zones to promote cooling. It has an under-mobo cable management system and a fan that mounts below the board to cool the back side of the system. It is due in Q3.

Luxa 300 case

Luxa comes in three flavors, 100, 200 and 300, and all are media center cases aimed at the high end of the market. If the brushed aluminum case doesn't give the expense part away, the 7-inch touch screen LCD should. The 200 loses the LCD in favor of a character panel and a lot lower price tag, and the 100 is about half the size of the other two.

Water cooling was not overlooked this year either, there are two new lines here as well. The first is the PW850i, a water cooling system with the components moved into separate units. Instead of a monolithic box with all the goodies, there are three smaller boxes with bright green tubing separating them. The idea is to allow more flexibility in mounting the unit in custom cases, something that some will appreciate, others will hate. For the haters, you can always buy the older monolithic systems.

The PW880i is more or less the same thing with bigger radiators and slightly beefier components for systems that need more heat removed. It also has an external bracket so you can mount the whole thing on the outside of the case. µ