In the test 15 years ago: Two towers were not enough for the Thermalright IFX-14

15 years ago, the Thermalright IFX-14 (test) was an absolute monster of a processor cooler. The twin-tower cooler with an additional 80 mm cooler not only set records in terms of cooling performance, but also in terms of weight and dimensions.

Table of contents

1. Two towers with additional cooler
2. Unchallenged performance
3. Conclusion

Two towers with additional cooler

The Thermalright IFX-14 was a particularly spacious twin-tower cooler with dimensions of 161.0 × 146.2 × 124.0 mm (H × W × D) and a weight of 790 grams without fan. If that wasn't enough for you, the HR-10 was a smaller, passive additional cooler for the mainboard, which could be used optionally. Including the heat pipe, it was 112.6 × 163.5 × 134.5 mm in size and weighed 130 grams. For many users, however, this cooler was probably useless: it required a good 12 centimeters of clearance from the back of the processor socket upwards without a mainboard sled, the case or the power supply getting in the way. The HR-10 could therefore not be installed in many cases.

Huge Cooling Combo: IFX-14 and HR-10

Konvexe Bodenplatte spaltet die Gemüter

Completely nickel-plated – the usual brilliant TR quality

Fan mounting possible in three places

Sandwich fan mode best performing

Unfortunately only rarely fits into the case: IFX-14 with HR-10 additional cooler

The actual IFX-14 could be equipped with up to three fans in 120 or 140 mm format – as usual with Thermalright, these were not included in the scope of delivery of the 70 euro cooler. The IFX-14 dissipated the waste heat from the copper base plate via four 8 mm heat pipes to the two cooling towers, each with 54 aluminum fins. Thermalright made the bottom plate slightly convex, which resulted in better performance on processors with a concave heat spreader, but at the same time had negative effects on flat heat spreaders.

Unrivaled performance

In accordance with the enormous dimensions, the IFX-14 made short work of all other coolers that had been tested by ComputerBase to date. In all three fan combinations, with the Scythe S-Flex SFF21D with 750 rpm, the Papst F2GLL with 1,140 rpm and the Sharkoon Power with 2,100 rpm, the IFX-14 was able to take the lead in the test field. The lead over the other coolers was particularly large at lower speeds, and the double ventilation made it even clearer.

Soft to medium configuration [< 40 dB(A)]

Power Configuration [> 40 dB(A)]

Conclusion

Given enough space and money, the Thermalright IFX-14 was the best cooler users could buy 15 years ago. The cooling performance was brutal and the workmanship was excellent. Nevertheless, Thermalright had to put up with criticism: The convex base plate could lead to problems with certain processors, the additional cooler was incompatible with many cases and the price of 70 euros without a fan was very high. If none of this bothers you, you won't go far wrong with the Thermalright IFX-14.

In the category “In the test 15 years ago”, the editors have been taking a look at the test archive every Saturday since July 2017. The last 20 articles that appeared in this series are listed below:

• The best Radeon HD 2600 XT were blue

< li>Thermalright's Ultra-120 Extreme was the reference

• 249 euros was too much for the Radeon HD 2600 XT X2
• Teufel's elegant 2.1 system with excellent sound
• Arctic Cooling's Accelero S1 was colder than the competition
• Zalman wanted to reinvent himself and failed
• Cooler Masters Cosmos at an astronomical price
• The best multimedia keyboard came from Microsoft
• Sparkles Caliber GeForce 8600 GT ran far apart from the Norm
• Xigmatek was on the way to success with the HDT-S1283
• Movie playback on GPUs from ATi versus Nvidia
• Teufel and Logitech in 5.1 exchange of blows
• Scythe's Katana 2 was the mid-range cooler king
• An almost inaudible gaming PC for 3,100 euros
• Corsair's Voyager GT was the best USB stick for 100 euros

li>

• HD 2000 with RV610 & RV630 convinced more than with R600
• DDR3 celebrated its premiere with the Intel P35 at Asus
• ATi CrossFire was 80 percent ahead – measured in dB(A)
• Halo 2 was a flop on the PC despite Vista
• Router, switch and NAS in one from Asus

Even more content of this kind and many more reports and anecdotes can be found in the retro corner of the ComputerBase forum.