Thermaltake NiC F4 Heatsink Review

NiC is an acronym for Non-Interference Cooler giving rise to a style of cooler that won't interfere with onboard components including extra tall memory modules.  Before the advent of enthusiast style self contained watercoolers you would have to worry about memory clearances, especially with modules like the Corsair Dominator and basically anything with a tall heatspreader.  The Thermaltake NiC F4 solves this problem by offering a thinner profile heatsink that supports dual fans and clears the memory banks on both LGA 115x and X79 motherboards.

Installation was extremely simple using the universal mounting kit.  There is basically two parts to installing this heatsink.  The first is establishing a base.  On X79 you'll use the factory LGA 2011 heatsink mounts while on LGA 115x and AMD you must assemble the base using the included back plate and threaded risers.  After that install the mounting rails and screw down the heatsink.

Overall performance was better than we had expected on a stock running Sandy Bridge.  During this test the heatsink performed great with very little fan noise.  Things didn't go so well during our overclocking test.  At 4.4Ghz we calculated that roughly 140w of power was being generated which caused overall temperatures to rise along with the C/W number.  The temperature spike caused both fans to spin at 100% which also created an annoying harmonic.  We have seen this happen before with thin profile heatsinks and the only solution is to either spin one fan slower or space the "pull" fan it away from the radiator.  

Of course the better solution would be to not saturate the cooler and limit your overclocking to the factory turbo settings.  

Memory clearance
Dual Fans Included
Good OEM Replacement Option
Simple To Install
Universal Mounting Hardware

Limited capacity for overclocking
Dual fan resonance at 100%
180w rating is a little generous