Components and Design
The Ultra-120 heatsink comes in a traditional Thermalright cardboard box, along with printed instructions and mounting hardware. No fan is included. Users must supply a 120mm fan of their choice.
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· Thermalright Ultra-120 heatsink
· AMD and Intel mounting hardware
· Fan mounting wires (2)
· Fan mounting rubber strips (2)
· Tube of Thermalright thermal compound
· Thermalright label
· Printed Installation sheets (K8 and 775)
As you might expect, the construction and appearance of the Ultra-120 is almost identical to the Ultra-90 — only larger. The Ultra-120 is slightly larger in every dimension and uses four heat pipes instead of three like the Ultra-90.
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At first glance you might assume the Ultra-120 heatsink was made exclusively from aluminum. However, the base and heat pipes are copper — only the fins are aluminum. The entire cooler is Nickel plated, which allows the components to be soldered together for optimum heat transfer.
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The square copper base exhibits a smooth machined finish and appears to be flat.
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The Ultra-120 comes with mounting hardware for AMD and Intel platforms. Both the K8 and 775 retention mechanisms use a plate to straddle the cooler’s base, which is then bolted to the motherboard retention frame with spring loaded screws. In the following picture, the K8 mounting plate is on the left (used with stock AMD backing plate) and the LGA775 mounting plates are on the right. Thermalright plans to release a new bolt-thru style AMD M2 mounting plate in the near future.
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Recommended Fan
Thermalright has traditionally recommended using a Panaflo fan (made by Panasonic) but for the Ultra-120 they leave the choice up to the end user — use any 120mm fan you want. For testing I used three different fans that ranged from slow and quiet to fast and very loud to see how the Thermalright Ultra-120 heatsink would respond to various levels of airflow. The low-speed Vantec Stealth was tested at 12V (quiet) and 7V (virtually silent).
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· 120mm Vantec Stealth (1500 rpm, 53 CFM, 28 dBA)
· 120mm Panaflo FBA12G12L1A (1700 rpm, 69 CFM, 30 dBA)
· 120mm Delta SHE (3700 rpm, 152 CFM, 53 dBA)
As mentioned earlier, the fan retention wires now clip over the base flange of the fan frame instead of having to reach over the whole width of the fan to the upper edge like they used to. This allows one set of fan wires to work with 15mm, 25mm, or 38mm thick fans. The only catch is that some fans have the space filled in between the mounting flanges (like Papst fans) so there is no where for the wire clips to hook into.
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