Introduction

Thermalright has been one of the top heat sink manufacturer, ever since the release of their SLK series. The SLK series of heat sinks perform extremely well. They actually outperformed most other heat sinks in the market. The SLK900/947 are the best heat sinks in the SLK series and they were designed to be the best in the market.

For the mid-range market, Thermalright is touting their copper and aluminium hybrid heat sinks - the ALX series. The ALX series is performing very well too, ouperforming almost every heat sink in the mid-range market. In some cases, it may even perform as well as the SLK700/800. It's no wonder why Thermalright heat sinks are favourite heat sinks of overclockers everywhere!

Now, the Thermalright SLK900/947 may be the best in the market but don't count on Thermalright to just sit there and wait for the other manufacturers to catch up. They will always keep improving their coolers to make sure they will always stay on the top.

With that in mind, they released their all-copper SP-9X series. The SP-9X series was designed to be the best of the top heat sinks in the market. They were actually designed to surpass even their SLK900/947 brothers! The SP-9X series currently consists of the SP-94 for Intel Pentium 4 processors, SP-97 for AMD Athlon XP processors and finally, the SP-98 for AMD Athlon 64 processors.

The SP-97

Today, we will take a look at the Thermalright SP-97 heat sink. Yes, it is the SP-9X model for AMD Athlon XP processors.

The SP-97 is very similar to the SLK900/947 heat sinks. The only difference is the addition of three heatpipes into the design for better thermal dissipation. Let's see if that's really true. But before that, let's have a look at this heat sink's specifications.

Specifications