The blue fan adds a little something extra to the design of the 965 and I like it more than the original version. The 965’s fan is a 92mm design, squashed into the mounting space of an 80mm fan. It gives some overhang to allow air to flow (and hence cooling) over additional components around the motherboard such as VRMs etc.

There is nothing special about the back of the cooler, the fins are fairly tightly spaced to give maximum surface area, which should provide more cooling.

You can see that this cooler has 3 heat-pipes running all the way round through the cooler, so they should work like 6.

Here is the top of the cooler. You can just see through the plastic shroud that the fronts of the cooling fins are actually wavy. This is to add more turbulence to the air being blown across the fins and get more of it in contact with the fins, hence cooling them, and the CPU better.

The cooler comes with thermal paste pre-applied, so there is no messing about before installation, and it eliminates the user error of putting too much or too little on.

Removing the thermal paste we can see that the base of the 965 is not very reflective at all. However, as I always seem to say, it is the flatness of the base that counts, not the finish, and the Akasa 965 looks to be pretty flat.

Next Page – Installation And Testing

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