Final Words & Conclusion
The Verdict
With the Venomous-X, Thermalright brings a very good cooler to the market. It's diverse, will mount on pretty much any Intel processor and definitely is capable of dealing with a hot and sweaty processor alright! We feel the Venomous-X is a good match to the Noctua NH-D14 Premium in terms of performance, yet a whole lot smaller. The thing is though, Noctua and pretty much any brand out there delivers their coolers with at the very least one fan. Now, the Venomous-X comes with a 60 to 70 USD price tag, which is definitely not cheap. For that money I really would have liked to have seen at least one fan included.
My moaning about the missing fan is really also the only negative I can think of. We very much like the Venomous-X for what it is and does. The mounting system is designed cleverly and is easy to install. The pressure vault bracket system is a little trivial though. I mean, you want your cooler block as close and tightly mounted to the processor as possible anyways, so I just do not see the added value in that other than it being a marketing gimmick at best. It doesn't change the fact though that the Venomous-X is one serious CPU cooler that will definitely perform.
Now please do realize that we always test in somewhat weird circumstances. We do not use your average boring default clocked processor, no Sir. The minute we smell tweakability we go for it. As such we overclocked our 2.66 GHz Core i5 750 processor to 4200 MHz and then kicked the processor in the proverbial balls by applying 1.5 Volts to it. When we then completely stressed all four CPU cores 100% for a while temperatures hovered at 70 Degrees C / 159F with the system remaining 100% stable. Yeah, that's a 1540 MHz overclock (!).
We overclocked with just one fan as most of you will use that setup, adding a second fan will help you shave another 3 to 4 degrees off peak temperatures, but that's it really.
So then, 60 EUR / 69 USD + 15 bucks for a fan does get you great performance with very respectable noise levels (depending on the fan). We can certainly recommend the Thermaltake Venomous-X for any enthusiast hardware entrepreneur that likes to tweak his processor a little. And if not, well then it's just a kickass CPU cooler you'll enjoy very much.
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