Phanteks PH-TC12DX_BK CPU Cooler

Staring right into the cooler you can see there are actually two towers of 49 fins surrounding the four 6mm heat pipes. Of course since this is the BK version, my fins are black, and it plays well against the nickel coating of the base and pipes.

The sides of this cooler are not enclosed, but do have a pair of tabs on the ends to allow each fin to support the one above, and keep the spacing unified at the same time, allowing the best thermal transfer out of each fin in the tower as possible.

I picked this higher angle to help show off the shape of the towers, much like something from Prolimatech. To cover the pipes and add a large area for the name, the top of the cooler uses an embossed plate to dress things up.

You can see that the pipes start off very close in the base, take a gentle bend away from each other, but are still aligned right in line with each other in the tower. I tend to prefer a staggered setup, but we shall see what happens.

The mounting cross bar comes attached to the top of the base, since both AMD and Intel mounting uses the same ending point to mount the cooler to, this will save users a ton of hassle trying to get that screw in the middle set properly.

Looking at the connection of the pipes into the fins, I have to say that they aren't very good to be honest. Even with that yellow-ish compound in there, there are still some good sized gaps where the fins aren't making contact to the pipes.