Thermaltake Beetle
4. Conclusion
The Beetle is surely a performance cooler. Running at the highest fan speed, the highest temperature from our CPU was barely 39.5° celsius and in idle mode, just 31°C. If you don't care about the extra noise the Beetle produces while keeping the processor cool, undoubtedly you'll love it.
The different pulsating colour leds, the UV sensitive material it's made of and the manual fan control panels, are all part of its feature set. However, the noise from the fan when running at full speed is a major drawback and if you decide to keep it at the lowest speed, then you lose all this great performance potential and the control panels become unnecessary. In which case, all you get is a huge, fancy but quite silent cooler, which is still great compared to the stock AMD cooler.
Installing the Beetle is quite tricky. If you decide to follow the steps presented in the leaflet included inside the package, you'll catch yourself wondering "How did they do that?". It seems the variety of motherboards on the market makes it too hard for a 4-in-1 solution to be installed as originally intended by TT, so you'll have to improvise a bit to make it work with your computer.
The Beetle costs around US$50. With the installation problems aside, the price is satisfactory for the given features and performance.
Pros:
- Great heat reduction
- Front & Rear manual fan speed controls
Cons:
- Huge size
- Questionable universal CPU application
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