While the Sonic Tower might not be the big boy of today's roundup in terms of weight or width, it sure has everyone destroyed in terms of sheer size. Though intended to operate purely passively, a means made to an end via the two gigantic 135x25MM dissipation towers, fed by three heat pipes that go up each, sprouting from the cooler's base. If there's one issue with this heatsink, it comes from the same place as its boon - while accessing the area you need to mount this heatsink, actually getting it mounted is a nightmare which will likely take off the years of the life that the silence will bring.
For the most part, the mounting system seems to be fairly well designed - K7 users will be forced to remove their motherboard and tie down a small H bracket, after all. Users of AMD's K8 platform will have to do nothing more than remove their stock bracket (again, if they have the threaded backplane). Otherwise, they will also have to remove the motherboard, install said bracket, and then bolt down the heatsink. Make sure that you have a long screwdriver handy for this method though, as it's not easy to reach all the way between the two towers. Users of the Socket 775 platform are in for a bit of a mixed bag; you will undoubtedly have to gut your motherboard, install a pair of brackets, then, while holding the heatsink level, use a pair of jeweler's screws (we kid you not) to affix an atrociously stiff bracket from side to side. Granted, once this is in place, there's no way your heatsink is going anywhere in a hurry.
Of course with these three well documented install routines, you all have to be wondering what the buzz is about by now. Oh, we'll tell you. The mounting system for Socket 478 seems to have been designed by Satan himself, after all it consumed over an hour of our time, before nearly causing a Silent Tower sized hole in our wall. To start, thread the two mounting brackets underneath the tremendous arms of the Sonic Tower. That was frustrating, but fine. Next, run a stainless steel I-Bar through underneath them. Simple, you say? Well you haven't hit the fun part. Now, tie down the brackets with a pair of ¼" hex bolts, which will supposedly hold your I bracket down with their tiny areas of pressure. Now, I don't know about you, but it's an incredible pain in the ass to try and get the stupid things to stay straight, let alone sit down in that manner. We never did manage to get this installed after an hour or so of use, but from it we do have a simple bit of advice. Users of the aging socket 478 platform, should not, under ANY circumstanced, even CONSIDER using this heatsink until the mounting situation is addressed. Our express apologies to the laps burned by coffee at Thermaltake after reading this chunk of review - this is a flat out excellent product, but the poor design of this platform's retention module is inexcusable.
With the demonic mounting hardware aside, there's a lot else to be said about this heatsink. First and foremost, the fit and finish of the unit is superb - each individual fin is stamped with Thermaltake's Logo, and "Cool All Your Life" slogan, fed off the trio of wide bore heat pipes. These heat pipes cross through a beefy, roughly machined but perfectly serviceable heatsink base. Found in the top and bottom of each of these fin blocks are a pair of threaded mounting holes, intended to assist you in bolting a fan to this heatsinks. Granted, this is far from the ideal way to keep your processor cool - holding a 120MM fan in place between the heat sink's cores will result in bloody low temperatures with bloody cold air coming out both sides, even when ridiculous overclocking takes place. That being said, it was most definitely nice to be able to use this heatsink passively, and still maintain our atrocious overclock with safe temperatures. As was said before, installing the unit is a snap when you're on three out of four platforms, and once this heatsink plants its big butt down, it's not going anywhere. If there is one issue to note though, it's that the sink may not work as effectively if the blocks are not facing the rear of the case (as was the case with our DFI motherboard). Even if this was a disadvantage though, the heatsink easily shrugs it off, holding down incredible temperatures, as you'll see in the section ahead.
