Thermaltake Suite at CES 2012

After checking out Thermaltake's cases, we took a look at their various new cooling solutions. These include both air and self contained water cooling solutions. The first of the batch is yet another air cooling huge heatsink behemoth that goes by the name of the Frio Extreme. This processor supports LGA 2011 and claims to 'support' 250W as in dissipating up to 250W of heat generated by the CPU from overclocking. The Extreme is the latest addition to Thermaltake's Frio line of coolers starting with the original Frio in 2010 followed by the Frio OCK and Frio Advanced in 2011 and in 2012, the Frio Extreme.



There is no doubt that the Frio Extreme is huge, it is so big that you'll find yourself blocking RAM slots with it and you'll likely want to have low profile DIMMs if you do go with this cooler so you can still use those slots. The Frio Extreme also features a 2 in 1 PWM fan controller which allows you to either manually control the speed of the fan with the controller or to disable manual control and let the BIOS control the speed as it would normally.



In addition to Thermaltake's air cooling offerings, they are also planning on expanding their watercooling options. In the past, these were part of the Big Water line of products, which to us, now sounds pretty dead. And to be honest with you, we were never quite impressed with them. This new line of products, though, is likely to be a winner. The entire Water 2.0 line of self contained low cost liquid cooling setups is manufactured by Asetek custom for Thermaltake. As part of this line, just like Asetek's current line, there will be three models. The thinner 120mm radiator Performer, the thicker radiator dual fan Pro and the dual 120mm radiator with dual 120mm fans Extreme all make up the three products in their line. Interestingly enough, we've had a chance to play with the Corsair H100 which is similar to the Extreme, but that cooler comes with 4 120mm fans instead of 2 which means there's a good chance that this cooler may not perform as well as the already available H100.

The Water 2.0 Performer (left) and Pro (right). The Extreme was installed into the Armor case.

Finally, wrapping up Thermaltake's component line of products we have some new power supplies from Thermaltake. These are namely their new Toughpower Grand 700w Snow and the Toughpower XT 1275 Snow. As you can imagine from their previous snow products this does indeed mean that these power supplies are white in design and have accompanying white cables with black accents. If you look at the majority of Thermaltake's new line of power supplies, though, you'll see that the majority of them are now 80 Plus gold certified which means that they are capable of up to 90% efficiency which translates into being a better PSU and saving you money in the long term. Some of their power supplies are even rated 80 Plus Platinum (the Toughpower XT Platinum 1275w Snow Edition and the Toughpower Grand Platinum 700w).

The full PSU line up

We also had a chance to check out some of Thermaltake's Tt eSports products which included their new line of DRACCO lifestyle headphones as well as their MEKA G-Unit Combat White and MEKA G1 Combat White. Personally, I'm not really convinced that ANY white keyboard is a good idea considering how dirty keyboards can get and how quickly that can happen. We're not quite sure what Thermaltake was thinking here, sure it's a great idea aesthetically and on paper but in practice is a pretty bad idea. Their DRACCO headphones also felt extremely cheap and looked very gaudy and almost felt like a rebranding of some skull candy headphones.

G-Unit White Keyboard

Thermaltake also showed us their two new gaming inspired mice, the Saphira and Theron both of which are inspired by Thermaltake's resident gamers White-Ra and Softball. We didn't really find these mice to be anything really amazing or inspiring, but perhaps we need to spend more time with them to really grow to love them. Needless to say, we'll see.

The Tt eSports Theron gaming mouse

And on that note, we're going to wrap up this article by saying that 2012 appears to be a busy year for Thermaltake and we can't wait to see what else they've got in the works for the rest of the year. Knowing Thermaltake, there's likely much more to come, probably during CeBIT or Computex Taipei.