Visual inspection
The Alpenföhn Black Ridge is designed for usage with mini ITX motherboards and SFF cases. The creator of the DAN SFX cases has been involved into the development of this CPU cooler, and thus, the Black Ridge is often recommended with said cases.
The Black Ridge has a height of just 47mm and a weight of 407 grams, and is meant to work with ITX motherboards that use short VRM heatsinks, thanks to its lower than average height.
The dimensions of the cooler & fan are: 140(W) x 47(H) x 120(D) mm.
The heatsink is using approximately 75 aluminum fins for dissipating the heat. The heatpipes are arranged in a C shape, to allow for the installation of the fan on the underside of the heatsink. The heatsink and heatpipes are covered by a dark gunmetal grey coating.
The Black Ridge uses six heatpipes, which are manufactured from nickel-plated copper. Each heatpipe has an outer diameter of 6mm and is soldered directly to the back of the baseplate of the cooler.
The endings of the heatpipes are symmetrically machined and complete the design of the Black Ridge cooler. In many cases, the endings of the heatpipes present on a CPU cooler, are left unshaped, and that can lower the aesthetic value of the design.
The base of the Black Ridge is manufactured from nickel-plated copper and is machined so smooth that the surface is reflecting just like a mirror. The sides of the baseplate have two threaded holes present, these are made to install the socket brackets on the CPU cooler.
The Alpenföhn Black Ridge has a single 92mm fan, which has no serial or model number visible. This small fan has the dimensions: 92 x 92 x 15mm and uses a Fluid Dynamic Bearing system, with a minimum rotational speed of 800 RPM and a maximum speed of 2800RPM.
The cable of the fan is short and has all black wires with no sleeving, the power is delivered through a standard 4 Pin PWM compatible connector.
Would love to see the box intel cooler included in these kind of tests.
Perhaps in the future.
This heatsink doesn’t support lga-2011 or 2011-3 I learnt this the hard way.
I’m sorry to hear that.
The way it’s mounted in the pictures is the worst possible configuration.
Heatpipe bend on the bottom would be most efficient and that way the ram slots wouldn’t be covered.
https://noctua.at/pub/media/wysiwyg/images/faqs/top_flow_orientation.jpg
I’ve had this conversation multiple times since this review was published. In my configuration, with an ATX motherboard, that orientation of the CPU cooler was the ONLY one possible.