A Closer Look at the TRUE Spirit ( Cogage True Spirit )

Cogage True Spirit   

As you can see, the TRUE Spirit really does look like a mini Thermalright Ultra 120 eXtreme….albeit one with a lot less heat pipes. Indeed, even the old Thermalright Ultima 90 has more and that cooler has been out for a long while. In grand total the TRUE Spirit has four 6mm heat pipes and is 133mm by 38mm by 158mm in size while weighing in at a respectable 670 grams which makes it no different from the original iteration.

Both older and newer versions of the True Spirit use four 6mm U shaped heat pipes, two of which start at the left top end, head down through the base (where they are soldered to the base and thus are able to pick up a huge amount of heat) and then climb back up to terminate the right end of the top. The other two heat pipes follow this same route but from right to left.

As with the previous version of the True Spirit, the top of heat pipes have been capped to give that nice clean look we like so much. We really wish more companies would take the time and either use metal caps on the top of their products’ heat pipes, or hide them in some other fashion like Zalman does. If Cogage can “afford” to do this, so can other manufactures on their more expensive kit.

The heat pipes have been staggered so as to allow the air from the fan the best possible chance of hitting each and every heat pipe equally with no inefficient dead spots where the heat pipes are competing for cooling (i.e. in each other’s “shadow”).

Just like most other great designs, Cogage has given the Spirit a truly dual face design. In fact it uses the same design as the venerable TRUE in that the face is not only concave to help channel the air towards the centre (and removed the dead zone created in front of the fan’s engine hub) but also the fins themselves are multi-angled. Each fin in the array has half of its edge (per side) angled up and the other half angled downwards. Cogage / Thermalright calls this design a "bent winglet" design and it is an apt description.

The base of this unit is decently finished and considering its price range the Spirit has been designed for, it is not too bad at all. Polishing a solid surface like this base should be easy and relatively inexpensive so there isn’t much excuse for the lack of absolute perfection. As expected the base is not even close to being flat, but this is par for the course and Thermalright does this on purpose as they state it helps “fit” the IHS better and thus is more efficient in transferring the heat from the CPU to the cooler.

Cogage True Spirit