The V3 Voltair is the highest-performing cooler we've ever tested—and the heaviest.

The V3 Voltair ($134.99) is a high-end CPU cooler with an innovative design and some of the best performance we've ever seen. But while it offers the best air-cooling you can currently buy for a PC, its weight and size will restrict it to users with large tower cases who rarely move the system chassis.

Typically, a high-end CPU cooler is a large block of copper with a finned radiator and attached heatpipes to transfer heat more effectively between the attach point and the radiator block. The Voltair incorporates these features, but it has another trick up its sleeve: It's what's known as a Thermo-Electric Cooler (TEC). This type of heatsink exploits the Peltier effect(Opens in a new window) to help cool a CPU.

Here's how the effect works: Two different semiconductor materials are joined in a metal plate and electrified. This creates a great deal of heat on one side (which builds up at the points where the two semiconductors are joined) and stays cold on the other, where the ambient temperature is lower than the temperature of the surrounding air. TEC coolers are often combined with home-built water coolers, since a water block can do an extremely effective job of removing heat from the hot side of the TEC.

The Voltair, however, isn't a full TEC cooler—it just uses the Peltier effect to assist conventional fans in cooling the CPU. That means that the hot/cold plate isn't robust enough (and doesn't pull enough electricity) to cool the CPU to sub-zero temperatures—but shouldn't become so hot that the air cooler can't handle the load. In a way, that's a positive; as the Peltier cooler plate temperature approaches zero, the chance of condensation steadily increases. The Voltair's design avoids this problem.

Design and Features The first thing you'll notice about the Voltair cooler is that it's absolutely enormous. Fully kitted out, this heatsink-and-fan combination weighs more than three pounds (3.28 to be exact). Intel's recommended maximum cooler weight for an LGA1150 socket is just about 1.1 pounds. Obviously, there are manufacturers that exceed this, but 3.28 pounds may be a record.

Here's why that matters—the heatsink mounts to the motherboard using four connection points. The motherboard has a small socket-reinforcing backplate, and the Voltair contains an additional backplate of its own, but you're still hanging a 3.28-pound chunk of copper vertically off the side of a slab of Printed Circuit Board. The good news about the Voltair is that it provides adequate room on both sides to install RAM, but you'll want to insert the RAM before you actually mount the cooler—the overhang from the cooler head is considerable.

If you're going to install the Voltair in a vertically standing case, you'll need to make sure the motherboard is fully screwed into the case at every attach point. We don't recommend moving the system while this cooler is installed. Putting additional lateral stress on the Voltair could be extremely damaging.

Cooler installation is fairly standardized; the Voltair ships with its own backplate and installation guide. The install kit also includes a fan controller, but on our review unit (either faulty wiring or a bad controller card) we weren't able to test the shipped backplate. Instead, we substituted the fan controller on the Rosewill Thor, our test case for this unit. This doesn't impact final results; basic fan controllers all work on the same principles.

Performance We tested the Voltair against the Noctua NH-L12 (stay tuned for the full review). At 3.5 inches tall (compared with the Voltair's height of 6 inches), the Noctua NH-L12 is a lower-profile cooler that's designed to fit into any type of desktop, including small HTPC cases. Like the V3 Voltair, it uses a pair of fans on either side of the heatsink, but total weight is far lower, at just 1.5 pounds. It's worth noting that RAM installation is slightly more problematic for the Noctua cooler (not all RAM heatsinks fit cleanly underneath its low-profile clearance). It's also nearly half the price of the V3 Voltair, at $70.

We tested both coolers using the Rosewill Thor enclosure with its integrated fan controller. An Intel's Core i7-4770K CPU was installed to a Gigabyte Z87X-D3H motherboard. We measured the CPU temperature using Real Temp RC6(Opens in a new window) . Measurements were taken while the system was idling at desktop 10 to 15 minutes after I booted up the system, and again after a 45-minute run of Prime95's Stress Test option. The Core i7-4770K CPU runs at relatively high temperatures, thanks to its on-die voltage regulators.

At full fan speed, the V3 Voltair outperformed the Noctua NH-L12, but was significantly louder. At minimal fan speed, it was nearly silent, but ran significantly hotter. This is partly due to the Peltier plate, which generates its own additional heat. Most users will want to use the included fan controller to find a happy medium between the two.

Conclusion The V3 Voltair is easily the largest, heaviest air cooler we've ever reviewed, and clearly one of the most powerful cooling solutions you can buy. At full speed, it can handle a top-end Intel Core i7-4770K CPU without even breaking 70 degrees Celsius when this CPU can push its own stock cooler up to 90 degrees Celsius.

But there's the cooler's price, and its weight—we don't recommend moving your case if you have this beast installed. At $134.99 list, the Voltair is priced against the closed-loop liquid coolers that AMD and Intel have both adopted for their highest-end processors. Such systems use liquid cooling (which may make some buyers nervous, even enthusiasts), but they also typically hang much less weight off the CPU socket, and the radiator is often bolted directly to the case.

If you want the highest-performing air cooler, the V3 Voltair is worth consideration. But if you move your tower frequently or don't have a full-size ATX enclosure, other cooling solutions will suit your needs better.

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Joel Hruska is a reviewer and industry analyst with more than a decade in the business. He currently writes for PCMag.com, Extremetech, and Hothardware.

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