Introduction

Our last adventure into cooling with Phanteks left us with the PH-TC14PE, a twin tower cooler, which used the same OEM to build their cooler as Noctua does. With the light that was shown then, the cooler was pretty much a redo of the D-14, but with enough flavor and personal touches to make it a cooler that does really well in today's market. To be blunt, I had just received Noctua's newest C-style cooler and I had thoughts that these coolers again may be the same concept, just done a bit differently to add that Phanteks flavor to the cooler. To be honest, with the amount of emails I get asking if I want to sample this or that, I just say go ahead and send it, then do the homework once it arrives.

I couldn't have been more wrong in this instance. Phanteks went a whole different direction than Noctua in this design. Phanteks has actually taken one of their super thick tower cooler fin arrangements from the dual tower design and bent the cooler over on its side. In reality, the heat pipes have to be a bit longer to make the bend and still offer room underneath for memory or motherboard heat sinks. Nonetheless, Phanteks chose to strap two 140mm fans to the chunky fin setup to deliver the best potential for cooling this C-style cooler and keeping the multiple color options that made the PH-TC14PE so popular.

The cooler we are about to get up close and personal with today is the PC-TC14CS from Phanteks. The last time I got a cooler from them, I grabbed the blue version to match my GIGABYTE motherboard. This time when asked as to which color, I went with the white version so it would "pop" in the images with the newer black motherboard I use for testing. As I mentioned, you can get this in all the same colors that the PH-TC14PE was available in, so you can match it to your personal tastes in your next build or upgrade.

At this point I say we get right into the mix, take a look at the specs and get through all the various images. Then we can get to the meat and potatoes of the PH-TC14CS from Phanteks and see just how well this dual fan cooled, C-style cooler competes against the other coolers we have tested.