Thermaltake Beetle
Examination:
Upon receiving the package, the first thing we noticed was the sheer size of it. It turned out to be larger than we had anticipated so we were pretty surprised. The Beetle is basically a tower cooler with an outer shell whose main purpose is to hold the fan in place. The outer shell of the Thermaltake Beetle is constructed out of red, silver, and transparent black/dark gray plastic. Encased in this shell is a set of 39 horizontal aluminum fins that are attached to six copper heatpipes that run up from the copper base. On the front of the Beetle is a circle style 90mm x 25mm fan. Multi-colored LED’s illuminate the center of the fan unit and a blue LED illuminates the undersides of plastic shell. When the unit was turned on it was very impressive. The LED in the front cycled through many different colors such as red, green, blue, purple, etc... The underside also contained a LED and it illuminated the Beetle quite well. This is probably one of the best-looking heatsinks that we’ve seen for a while here at Phoronix. Moving on, we checked the heatsink base. To our disappointment the finish was rather rough and could use a good lapping, however, the base did seem to be flat and so the contact should be acceptable. On the Beetle cooler we found two wires: one for 3-pin power connector and one for fan speed control. As for all the accessories included, everything seemed to be in good shape and also appeared to be constructed well. The two included fan controllers were also nice and the expansion slot controller was polished to a very nice shiny finish. Lastly the manual was very easy to read and the steps were all well explained and accompanied by pictures.
Installation:
So far everything had been very satisfactory, but during installation was where we ran into many problems. First of all we tried to install the unit on our Abit NF7-S Revision 2.0 motherboard. We quickly found that it would not work with this motherboard because Abit engineers had twisted the CPU socket 90 degrees, forcing the Beetle to sit with the fan facing the bottom of the case. This caused the Beetle to run into the power supply unit and so installation was not possible. Even if it were possible, the hot exhaust would be blowing straight into the power supply, which was definitely not the optimal arrangement. Using an ASUS P4P800, installation on this motherboard was free of any obstruction issues. However, this didn’t mean that the installation was easy. Installation was a huge hassle because the motherboard needed to be removed. It was basically an I-bar pressing down on the motherboard that was secured by two screws. It was very difficult to secure, but after it was attached, it seemed to be safe. For the thermal interface material, we used Arctic Silver 5. Once the Beetle was secured on the motherboard, all we had to do was connect the 3-pin fan wire to the motherboard and connect the fan speed control wire to the controller (we used the expansion slot controller). Everything was set and ready to go, and it was time for the Beetle to take its first flight in our system! As a cautionary note to those who use this Beetle or any other Thermaltake product with a fan speed controller, please be gentle when connecting and disconnecting the fan speed controller wire to the controller. The head of the connector is known to fall off if the user is careless while connecting and disconnecting it. If the head breaks off then user will not be able to control the fan at all and it will always run at maximum speed, which in this case, will result in a 44.5 dB headache.