There is a new name in the CPU cooler arena, and it is aiming straight for the big guys. Today we’re reviewing the PH-TC14PE by Phanteks, a company you probably never heard of until recently. According to their website, they have been in the cooling business for 20 years, so one can assume that they have been designing and manufacturing OEM cooling devices all this time.

Their first high-end consumer product is the PH-TC14PE, and you will be excused if you thought that it looked awfully familiar:

There’s no way of avoiding comparisons to the Noctua NH-D14, which is why we’re going to do exactly that in this review. Phanteks is clearly aiming directly at the Austrian product with the PH-TC14PE (even going as far as proclaiming it as being “designed in Europe” although there is no indication of where in Europe it was designed, and why it wasn’t designed in Taiwan, where the company is based).

Phanteks vs Noctua

As we take a closer look at the Phanteks PH-TC14PE on the next page, we’ll talk about the differences and similarities between these two behemoth coolers. After that, we’ll go through the installation, then test it on our overclocked 4.4 GHz Core i7 Extreme 3960X which draws upwards of 400W at the wall when under full load.

Phanteks PH-TC14PE – Do You Like Acronyms?

Like Noctua, Phanteks lists several patented features to make their product stand out from the rest. These include:

• P.A.T.S (Physical Antioxidant Thermal Shield) – basically a coating over the heatsink which deflects “other thermal radiation from other heat sources, such as the GPU, South Bridge, North Bridge, etc”. They say that this makes it more effective in a closed environment.
• C.P.S.C (Cold Plasma Spraying Coating Technology) – Based on the website, this apparently refers to the way the heatpipes are coated, so they make better contact with the rest of the heatsink.
• M.V.B (Maelstrom Vortex Booster) fan blades – Like Noctua, Phanteks has added small protrusions to their fan blades. This can increase the wind vortex size and/or alter its shape to make it perform better.
• M.A.F.O (Maelstrom Air-Fort Optimization) – Pertains to the drive system, although I’m not exactly sure what exactly it refers to.

If one thing is for sure, the Phanteks PH-TC14PE has more acronyms than we have seen in a long time! I said this in our Noctua NH-D14 review, and I’ll say it again here. Whether any of these features actually do anything in particular, we will never really know. All we can do is test the overall performance of a product, and see how it does! We will be testing the claim that it performs better in a hot environment of course…