At a first glance, the Titan Cool-Idol CPU cooler looks very promising, due to its massive size, its interesting design and the 120mm fan. Provided that the cooler is addressed to power users as its price also indicates ($59), we were really anxious to start using it and take some measurements.

However, the cooler showed an underhelming performance, in terms of cooling efficiency and noise. We can assume that the cooler's design finally didn't help much since the produced hot air coming from the wide area the CPU fan covers could not easily escape our PC case, despite the fact that two additional PC case fans were operating. Perhaps the performance would be better in full tower case.

The installation process would take some time and requires you to remove your motherboard from your PC case. This could trouble amateur users. If we look at the numbers, the cooler was performing well as long as the cooling requirements are not extreme, under heavy overclocking. After that point, the cooler was unable to compete with the some of rest coolers of our test, even at full speed. Speaking of the included fan, its rather noisy at full speed so you may need to use the included PCI bracket to slow it down. The included Titan Royal Grease seems to work well although the Tuniq TX-2 thermal paste we sued gave slightly better results.

To sum up, we can say that overclockers should look for other less noisy and more powerful products. Today you can buy higher performers with less money so we expect Titan to either reduce its retail price or make the proper adjustments in order to reach top performers like the Titan Amanda Tech :-)

Retail package
Design
Motherboard compatibility
Installation time
Copper Base quality

Pros:

+ Very good retail package
+ Works with both AMD/Intel platforms
+ Includes Titan Royal Grease thermal paste
+ Despite its large size its easily movable
+ Aluminum fins placed high enough to maintain compatibility with most boards
- Full copper base

Cons:

- Performance numbers doesn't justify its retail price ($59)
- Fan produces high noise at full speed