Components and Design
The front panel of the Triton 81 sports the first of two 92mm fans that run between 800 and 2,500 RPMs when needed. We like the overall design concept incorporated on this product, but I wonder a little about noise and vibration from the fan brackets. They probably could have found a different method for mounting the fans onto the fin array that would have reduced vibration noise which can get irritating if users have worked to keep their PCs silent.
The right-side view of the heatsink shows how the four copper heatpipes are integrated between the interlocking aluminum fin array. There’s decent spacing between all the aluminum fins, which should help discipate heat a lot better. The two 92mm fans can also be seen in all their glory along with the blue fan brackets that ASUS used.
The top of the heatsink shows all four of the U-shaped copper heatpipes protruding through the top of the aluminum fin array. There are also four screws that secure the two 92mm fans to the heatsink directly. Our readers can also see the weird fin array design that ASUS used for the Triton 82. I’m not sure if they did it for asthetics or for some functional purpose, but it looks really cool nonetheless.
Here’s a close-up shot of the copper base that has been mostly polished, but you can see some grains which indicate the milling wasn’t done all the way down to a mirror finish. There are also four screw holes for mounting the brackets to connect the heatsink to Intel-based CPUs.
This side-profile shot gives our readers a great view of how the four U-shaped heatpipes are integrated into the base itself. This is a pretty traditional method and used quite often by a variety of vendors.
The aluminum fin array is interlocked a variety points throughout the design to ensure premium heat transfer and have enough stability to keep the heatsink itself intact. The spacing between each of the aluminum fins is also fairly wide, but should provide more than adequate space for the flow of heat to be transferred away from the heatpipes and through the dual-fan exhaust system.
The entire design of this heatsink is extremely unique and there aren’t many like it on the market. The outright weird aluminum fin array design is very appealing to the eye, but I wonder how it will perform during our benchmarks. The base of the heatsink also made me a bit weary because it had quite a few scratches which might imped how the CPU, thermal paste, and heatsink interact during operation. We usually like finely polished bases because they seem to provide better contact between the CPU and heatsink.
