Thermaltake Engine 27 1U Low-Profile 70W Intel 60mm Low Noise PWM Fan

Thermaltake Engine 27 1U Low-Profile 70W Intel 60mm Low Noise PWM Fan

Thermaltake Engine 27 1U Low-Profile 70W Intel 60mm Low Noise PWM Fan

factor CPU cooler that uses whirling metal blades for an internal fan of sorts though the fans theoretically also serves as additional service area for heat sinking and dissipation the hope is that cool air enters the top and gets forced outward to a more traditional heat sink theoretically permitting a smaller physical footprint while retaining competitive cooling performance to traditional fan and heatsink designs today we're reviewing the thermal take engine 27 and its

sandhya / cool trip inspired engineering first this coverage is brought to you by XOR diem games and their indie game bear with me a more themed adventure that tells a sarcastic dark and nonlinear story with playable sidekick teddy bear go figure the game is currently 50% off on Steam at the link of the description below the original sandhya cooler had a different design than the one that Thermaltake is using though some aspects of it are the same in the sandia model rather than having a centrally mounted fan made out of aluminum they spun the entire aluminum heatsink so the entire set of fins just spun in a circle with no traditional fan centrally

or otherwise the cooler also used a hydrodynamic air bearing and it conveyed the did the heat transfer across an air gap basically this was not something that ever really came to market in a consumer or CPU cooling usage we have never had our hands on one cool chip also worked on this design and works with thermal take on the engine 27 so this is the closest thing we've got to it right now and the idea would be that in the original model use the entire heatsink as a fan and therefore have greater surface area and theoretically you eliminate some of that thin layer of air that accumulates around the blades of a normal fan and heatsink setup so Dante has

taken the piece that got the most heads turning the rotating aluminum blades and stuck it in a more traditional heat sink using 119 L shaped aluminum fins in the outer layer and 40 aluminum fins in the inner layer with a kinetic bearing and an 8 pole motor internally the motor does mean that you'll have to divide your RPM measurements by 2 get an accurate reading bios doesn't quite understand what it's looking at this is the exact same thing that you'd have to do with most liquid cooler pumps to determine their real rpm as they also have double the poles of what is expected for PWM thermal takes engine 27 and it's 27 millimeters in

the height as indicated by the name engine 27 the cooler is one of these select few that would fit in something like Silverstone's at Pt 13 case or the petite series cases which are really slim small form-factor HTV see boxes that would be what you would use something like this for it also means that depending on how high you're willing to go in terms of cooler height the competition is pretty slim something like Silverstone's MTO 8 115 XP right here is 32 millimeters in height so even this is larger than the engine 27 and fitment is not actually going to work in the PT 13 which demands a 30 millimeter cooler or thereabout so there are a couple

of interesting scenarios for testing this because we've got to take height into account the silverstone MTO is 7 would be the next smallest that we could consider at 23 millimeters but overall the engine 27 and its fan is meant to be used in small form-factor boxes where you wouldn't be stepping up to something like a cryo rig c 7 at 47 millimeters because that's clearly going to be better than both of these but we'll be looking through all of those in our thermal testing today taking the thermal take engine 27 apart reveals that there's a fixed base that

doesn't spin connected to the cold plate and outer fins via a thin layer of thermal paste the base then transfers the heat to the rotating fins as you would expect but is also still transferring the heat to the outer thin as for the rest of it thermal takes website uses a thermal image to demonstrate the temperature of the CPU cooler and the surrounding motherboard components let's momentarily ignore the flawed approach to pointing a thermal camera at a heatsink and just talk about scales in charts we're going to remove thermal take scale and show you the image with no scale the direction we get from this is that the VRMs are hot a towel as you'd

expect maybe eighty to ninety c while the cooler measures just 35.6 c let's have the scale back in its twenty three thousand to forty five so probably ambient to 45 Celsius for some reason so what looked like a potential 50 C difference is actually a 10 C difference and is totally insignificant and again ignoring the fact that pointing a thermal camera at a heatsink is pointless anyway at least this kind of heatsink we still don't know anything either testing we don't know what motherboard it was so we don't know the vrm spec and more importantly it's an irrelevant measurement that means nothing the fact that a CPU cool or a block of aluminum

appear is cooler assuming they've done the thermal imaging correctly and taking all the parameters into account like emissivity and reflectivity and all of that assuming that why what does it tell you it tells you that the block of aluminum is cooler than who knows what motherboard components were surrounding it so that is exactly what you would expect and it would look the same if we took an image of this cooler or pretty much any other cooler now again this is just a fundamental misunderstanding with thermal cameras we don't know the temperature of the CPU just because we can point a camera at the cooler and get the temperature theoretically of the blades so this is a marketing image and you should ignore it

completely and instead defer to our testing which is actually useful getting into this review we're abandoning our standard cooler test bench in favor of an ITX pacific bench these small form-factor coolers can't handle as much heat as the big stuff so with a TT engine 27 were rated for about 70 watt TDP CPUs because of that rather than use something way beyond spec like a 6700 K we're opting instead for an i3 6300 CPU and an ITX motherboard because ultimately this cooler is meant for ITX so we'll be testing it on ITX components all the testing methods are in the article linked below as always if you're curious but for competition we're testing against

the silverstone and t o8 115 XP and the cryo rig c7 coolers both of which are also small form factor the silverstone unit measures at 33 millimeters tall with cryo rigs quite a bit larger than both thermaltake and the silverstone at 47 millimeters tall this means that cryo rigs will undoubtedly outperform both the others and that lower rpm but provides a smallest to largest look at performance across the stack as always for all the testing methodology check see link to the article in the description below which also contains the full review where we talk about all this stuff in text form if you prefer that the measurements use our delta T over ambient so this

is not sort of the exact temperature of the diode or package readings it's a delta T value which we've explained in the past it's to help equalize some of the testing and that is all in that article linked in the description below if you have any questions at all we're only showing three coolers right now as ITX cooler testing is new for us the cryo rig c7 lands at the top of the bench with a load temperature of about 53 Celsius delta T as coolers also 47 millimeters tall or 20 millimeters taller than the engine 27 and 15 taller than the nto ate at a loud 3600 rpm Silverstone's n t o8 operates at around 57 H Celsius delta T load with idols around 7 Celsius the Thermaltake

Engine 27 at 2500 rpm its max speed keeps temperatures in significantly warmer at 59.6 celsius delta T load none of these are particularly impressive but they are all more or less equal when considering that the lesson2 cooling performance and potential of a small form-factor cooler priority 7 bandages to properly differentiate itself with a more noteworthy advantage in cooling and one which is attributable to its larger stature and superior heat sink but Thermaltake and silverstone aren't too far apart and those are the head to head competitors in this bench and they are the numbers that matter most purely from a competing size perspective Silverstone

and Thermaltake are the ones worth highlighting right here we're setting each cooler to run at an RPM that equals a noise output of 43 DBA this means that the Silverstone cooler operates at 3300 rpm and the sound will take engine 27 operates at 2500 rpm so we'll highlight just those two results 59.6 celsius versus 60.1 that's what we come out with and that's within our 0.5 C range a variance on CPU temperature generation and measurements for all intents and purposes when equalizing the noise levels these coolers are identical in performance here's a chart showing all of the noise levels the coolers tend to be more effective in terms of cooling to noise when around 40 DBA just by coincidence with the engine 27 maintaining a some level of

acceptable performance when at 70 percent fan RPM with a 36.5 DBA output you'll start to struggle with higher workload scenarios if you want all the noise levels for everything we've tested here's a quick chart for that you might want to check the article again links in description below for more times read through the data because the watt but the testing methods for these are comparable enough that we can put them on the same a chart really it puts into perspective how effective a liquid cooling is given the height of the cooling block assuming the tubes and radiator can also fit in your SSS box pretty uncommon but worth a

look one thing that isn't shown with our noise testing we do just a straight DBA test what we're not showing is a frequency spectrum analysis which would be useful admittedly but it's something we haven't expanded into just yet at least not since the fury ACT this thing the thermal take engine 27 it's noise levels even when matched to the silverstone are a lot more they're a lot less tolerable put it that way basically it's a matter of the type of noise so the type

of noise coming out of the Silverstone unit even when they're both at 43 DBA is a lower hum it's more what you would find with any fan whereas the type of noise coming out of the thermal take cooler is similar to Sandhya's noise that comes out in their original marketing pitch review they did where it's got that high-pitched whine and they said it was a variance in some pre-

production saying whatever the type of noise the same that's coming out of this so it is a higher pitch noise and that means it's less tolerable at least to me that's a subjective thing I suppose in general we find that the lower hums like out of this are a lot more tolerable than what's coming out of a high-pitched whining spinning set of blades the engine 27 is a unique attempt at making a smaller profile cooler it's interesting and Thermaltake explains that they worked with cool chip to develop 27 strictly in terms of thermal performance it's around where the comparable size NGO 8 115 X Pele and particularly when considering equal noise output it's also over two

times if you can fit a forty seven millimeter cooler and still have breathing room above it for the fan cryo rigs c7 is the clear winner of all of these coolers is just a lot bigger and won't fit in a slim htpc like the PT series Silverstone cases ultimately the engine 27 is in a bad cooler it performs about the same as the Silverstone n t o8 especially again when accounting for the noise levels so there's no crime against humanity for making this thing the only thing that this has working against it well there's two things one is it's priced significantly out of its performance bracket so at over two

times the cost of an equally performing Silverstone cooler which is a traditional fan and heatsink arrangement it's hard to justify spending fifty versus twenty in this case there's also the high-pitched whine which if you lower your fan speed and you don't run it 100% all the time it kind of goes away so it's going away around seventy to eighty percent but you will start having issues with really intensive workloads if you need that 100% fan speed and are also trying to avoid the noise so really specific set of requirements there but this is a really specific
type of cooler .

Thermaltake Engine 27 1U Low-Profile 70W Intel 60mm Low Noise PWM Fan

a CPU cooler you take a big old hunk of metal you take a plastic fan and ya slap it on there in hopes that the raging inferno of a Pentium D processor you've got will stay alive long enough to become a weird curiosity for the employees you hire ten years down the line who were it's still in diapers when you started building computers but not thermaltake now thermaltake took a metal heatsink okay I'm with you so far slapped a metal fan onto it because Yolo in an attempt to cool down a modern CPU in one of the smallest foreign factor coolers that I've ever seen but does it work so if you were just here to find out if a metal fan would work then you'll be sorely

disappointed because I'm also gonna bore you with some science and history the Sandia cooler concept with its metal spinning top and static metal base first showed up on the scene in 2012 with this video gaining considerable attention among PC enthusiasts due to its promises of vastly improved efficiency smaller size and quieter operation compared to more traditional heatsink designs then there was no news until Coolermaster showed up at CES 2015 with a couple kind of ugly prototypes that featured grooves between the spinning top and the base presumably to improve heat transfer and an outer heatsink to further improve cooling

performance fast-forward to today and this tech is finally on the market the fundamental idea here is pretty simple theoretically when the air gap between the fixed grooved metal base and the spinning grooved metal impeller is small enough heat transfer can still occur as though they were connected in practice this was pretty difficult to pull off but through a combination of patience and apparently balancing the impeller like the wheel on a car Thermaltake was the first one to do it to test how effective the engine 27 was we gathered up a bunch of other small form-factor coolers from reputable brands and a stock Intel heatsink since if it doesn't offer a

compelling improvement over that you're clearly better off saving your money we used an asus z170 AI pro gaming motherboard thanks bros and a core i7 6700 K with an NZXT grid 2.0 for fan control for each test we used a pea-sized amount of IC diamond thermal compound and we analyzed the results two different ways first we looked at what could expect from each cooler out of the box using the silent mode curve in NZXT scam software the engine 27 was the worst-performing cooler in this test at about 10 degrees higher than the nearest aftermarket competitor under load and all of this while managing to be louder than the Intel Box cooler as measured by our X Tech 407 750 digital sound level meter the second method of analysis was to

introduce a noise ceiling limiting the maximum rpm of each cooler to the speed at which it reaches 45 decibels the same as the stock cooler so performing worse than the stock cooler or thermal throttling would result in a fail grade for this test all of them passed but CPU cooling isn't the be-all and end-all and maintaining enough airflow to the components nearby is of critical importance the good news is that all of our coolers perform similarly with the c7 only pulling ahead when we allowed it to get a little noisy leading us finally to the reason presumably that thermal takes engineers thought the engine 27 deserved to exist its size it's not the top

performer in any category but this one at a full centimeter shorter than the nearest competitor from knot to ax and less than half the height of the top performing aro 6 from Silverstone the engine 27 is compatible with any case that's wide enough to fit a memory stick so with form factor as a consideration I'll be giving a few awards here today the aro 6 gets my big and beautiful award for being the best performer if a little top-heavy the Noctua NHL 9 i takes home the middle child award for being so ugly only its own mother could love it but otherwise a solid compact choice and the Thermaltake Engine 27 gets my better than nothing award for
working better than I expected given its size making it a great option if you don't have anything else that will fit.

Learn more about the Thermaltake CL-P032-CA06SL-A

ModelBrandThermaltakeSeriesEngine 27ModelCL-P032-CA06SL-A
DetailsTypeFan & HeatsinksFan Size60mmCPU Socket CompatibilityIntel LGA 1156 / 1155 / 1150 / 1151RPM1500 - 2500 RPMAir Flow9.2 CFMNoise Level13 - 25 dBAPower Connector4 Pin PWMHeatsink MaterialAluminum & Copper
Dimensions & WeightMax CPU Cooler Height27 mmFan Dimensions60.00 x 60.00 x 21.00mmHeatsink Dimensions27 x 91.5 x 91.5 mmWeight0.68 lb.
FeaturesFeaturesDesigned for 1U Applications 27mm Height

Metallic Alluminum Alloy Structure

Non-Interference Cooling Design

40-blade Fan Design generates improved air volume

Radial Fin Arrangement minimizes gapping for improved exhaust efficiency

Optimized PWM Control for Silent operation

Compatible with Intel Platforms.