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ThermoLab recently announced their latest product which they call BADA, meaning the sea in Korean, of course. The BADA is a modest sized cooler that implements Heatpipe Direct Touch (HDT) technology in an effort to maximize performance in a smaller foot print, and we are going to find out how well it works... Late last year a new company called ThermoLab sent us their first product known simply as BARAM, which was of course a CPU cooler. The BARAM looked to be just another CPU cooler, adding to the countless already available. However ThermoLab assured us the BARAM was special and insisted that we check it out, and well we did.  Surprisingly, despite the not so exciting name, the BARAM was a bit of a special product, delivering some of the best results achieved on our overclocked Core 2 Quad Q6600 test system. The BARAM made its début at the reasonable price of $52 US, making it one of the more affordable high-end coolers, even if it didn’t come with a fan. Now almost a year later the BARAM is selling for just $45 US, while ThermoLab are ready to launch their next product. The BARAM should be viewed as a success as it was affordable and delivered top notch performance at low operating volumes. Based on our testing, it was just as good as anything else out there, matching the Thermalright TRUE Copper, Prolimatech Megahalems and Noctua NH-C12P for example. So where do ThermoLab go from here? Realistically there is no way to improve on the BARAM without making an incredibly large heavy heatsink that costs more than most processors. Therefore it appears that they have not tried to improve on the BARAM and instead have just created another heatsink. The new BADA heatsink is not looking to replace the BARAM, but rather provide consumers with a more compact alternative. The BARAM was quite a large heatsink, measuring 160mm tall and 132mm wide. Although we had no issues installing it in a number of systems, there are those that will require a BARAM type heatsink that takes up less room. The BADA on the other hand measures 135mm tall and 115mm wide. Furthermore the BADA is a completely universal product, that also comes complete with fan. |
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