360° View - Thermaltake Frio Advanced Heatsink Information on Frostytech's test methodology is available here.
The twin 130mm PWM fans rotate at 2000-800RPM and draw power from separate 4-pin motherboard fan headers. One fan is used to intake air, the other has a reversed impeller which exhausts air out the back of the fin tower. The five copper heatpipes are 6mm in diameter.
Both fans clip into a plastic fan shroud, which then clips onto the 111mm tall aluminum fin tower. The heatsink itself stands 161mm tall, the bottom-most fin is 41mm above the CPU socket for clearance of adjacent motherboard components. Each aluminum fin measures 0.4mm thick and is spaced 2.0mm apart from the next.
The exposed heatpipe base of the Thermaltake Frio Advanced heatsink measures 45x42mm in size. The five 6mm diameter heatpipes are swaged into a 9.5mm thick aluminum extrusion that provides support for the heatpipes and mounting brackets.

Base Finish and Flatness

Flipping a heatsink over to inspect the business end is often a simple indicator of overall cooler quality. More practically speaking, a heatsink is in many ways only as effective as the contact it makes with the processor - the flatter and smoother the better. Base finish is one of the criteria that Frostytech measure in the course of evaluating heatsinks, and it involves two distinct aspects. Surface Finish is the first; this is calculated with the aid of Surface Roughness Comparator that has a cross section of common machine surface finishes and their numerical surface roughness equivalents in microinches. The second is Surface Flatness. This is tested with an engineers straight edge or proven flat surface, in two axis.

The exposed heatpipe base of the Thermaltake Frio Advanced heatsink has a sanded surface finish with a surface roughness of approximately 63 microinches. The base itself is somewhat convex in one axis and generally very flat in the direction of the heatpipes.

Next up, Frostytech heatsink sound level measurements...