Specifications, Availability and Pricing

The Thermalright Shaman is made mostly of aluminum with its fifty-five fins. This cooler is large, with dimensions of 160mm long. It isn't that long, but with the 132mm in width and 54.5mm of thickness, this four slot cooler is going to need a lot of room to house it. Along with the mass of aluminum, there are the eight, yes eight, 6mm heat pipes. These pipes are sandwiched between a nickel plated copper base and aluminum "puck" for the top. The pipes themselves are also nickel plated and make some unusual twists and bends to make their way into the fins of the cooler. Around the finely polished base you will find the mounting plate that offers four different mounting patterns to make this cooler very universal to most of the latest mid range and top end GPUs.

Unlike most of the coolers we have seen to date, the Shaman uses one large fan over a pair or trio of smaller fans. There is some give and take to consider here. While Thermalright ships the Shaman with a TY-140, 140mm fan, it uses a 4-pin PWM connector. What this means, is that you either need to adapt this to run 12V through it, or find a header on the motherboard that offers PWM control, where as the earlier submissions offered adapters, or the ability to plug the fans directly into the card for software control with your favorite application. What this 140mm fan does offer is up to 1300 RPM producing 73 CFM of air flow. Noise level ratings are impressive with a 21 dBA maximum rating, but that is one of the benefits to using a larger fan to take care of business.

As I do with every review, at this point I am checking Google shopping and it shows only eight locations if you don't count the one I found on e-Bay. Finding one isn't so tough it seems, but now we move on to the pricing. Here I found that there isn't a large gap between stores. The base price I saw was $69.99 at Mwave.com before shipping, and on the high end pricing went up to $79.95 at Heatsink Factory. So if you do decide that the Thermalright Shaman is the cooler for you, you can save yourself enough money for that TIM you always forget to add to an order if you shop right. So let's just see if in fact the Shaman is the cooler to buy as we move on to the packaging and then dive right into the cooler.