CPU Air Cooler Mega Test

Raijintek Pallas

Price:  £29.99

Technical Specification

 

Up Close

The low and flat orientation of the box hints at the Pallas being a low profile cooler, and indeed it is.  Along with a 1400rpm low profile fan you also get a “big-bag-o-screws” to wade through to find the fittings you need for the varienty of Intel and AMD sockets the Pallas is designed to fit.  What is worrying is that it appears to be the same method as used on the Themis and the thought of tackling this fitting system again fills us with dread 

  

       

 

The Pallas arrived in much better condition than the Themis, with not a hint of a bent fin to be found, but then, the fins do appear to be thicker and more substantial anyway.  The fan spring clips however are far from substantial, and about the most ill fitting and awkward to use we’ve ever come across.  You practically have to break things to get them on, and once on they are near impossible to remove without ripping a nail off or gouging yourself open.

       

 

Raijintek have managed to cram no less than 6x6mm copper pipes into the Nickel plated copper contact plate, which is no mean feat.  It’s also nice to see that things are clean and tidy down here, which alludes to a more stringent (or lucky) quality control process for the Pallas.

       

 

I’d really like to meet the sausage womble that designed the fitting system for the Pallas and for that matter all the other Raijintek coolers.  I’d sit him down with a Noctua cooler and show him the similarities between his design and the Noctua and show him just how easy it would have been for him to achieve perfection, then i’d slap him around the head with the cooler to emphasis just how far away he managed to fall.  Another point worth mentioning is that as this is a low profile top down cooler it offers cooling to the near socket motherboard components.  If you’re wondering why we’ve got it mounted the way we have, the answer is simple.  We couldn’t mount it with the fin stack overlapping the RAM, not because it was too low (although it was damned close), but because the end of the heat sink stuck out so far that it fouled the 24pin cable and socket.  |n terms of performance, the Pallas faired slightly better than the Themis but still not brilliantly in terms of it’s overall and divisional standings.