Heatpipes: The Investigation Begins

While we had tested two separate OCZ Reaper HPC heatpipes, for the three other heatsinks/heatpipes tested so far there was only one sample available to try. However, for the next heatpipe we're onto is from Abit. Abit's OTES (Outside Thermal Exhaust System) has been around for a couple of years now on various Abit motherboards and graphics cards. Their OTES implementation started out on the legendary Abit IC7-MAX3 motherboard. However, OTES didn't begin as being a silent heatpipe-based solution as with this Intel 875P motherboard it had a fan at the I/O panel and shroud over some power circuitry that never came in contact with the Canterwood chipset. It wasn't until the Intel Glenwood era that we saw this OTES incarnation go silent and with a "Q-OTES." You can see this early Silent OTES cooler from our Computex Taipei 2005 coverage and in our Abit AW8-MAX review.

The first Abit Silent OTES heatpipe we had opened up was one off the Abit AW9D, which was previously overclocked to its death in our Winter Overclocking Challenge.