ThermoEngine Comparison - Solid vs. Hollow

Just as quickly as Thermosonic's ThermoEngine entered the cooling market, it has since managed to get itself into controversy. The controversy stemmed from apparent differences between the Thermoengine heatsinks being circulated around the hardware review community, and those available for sale on the retail level. Since a lot of the interest in the Thermoengine heatsink surrounded the hollow center core, suspicions were aroused when retail units started popping up with solid cores.

The evolution of a product is nothing new, and even though the differences between the two types of Thermoengine raised a lot of questions, the only real question is "does this even make a difference in terms of cooling"? This also happens to be the only question we can really answer about the change in the Thermoengine's design, and one that we will be putting to rest in a few moments.

When we first reviewed the hollow Thermoengine it performed at the top of the class of reference heatsinks. Its efficient design impressed us just as much as the numbers when we tested it on the FrostyTech Synthetic Temperature Test Platform. The hollow inner chamber, as demonstrated by sites like Overclockers.com and HardOCP.com, only served to heighten the perceived capabilities of this elegant aluminum extrusion design. We were very impressed with the results of those heatsinks we tested, and we still are.

In this review we will be examining the following:

• The physical differences between the two heatsinks
• Showing our synthetic temperature test results
• Pointing out the Four tips to identifying a solid Thermoengine in a store

Let us begin our comparison of the Hollow Thermoengine vs. the Solid Thermoengine.