There are a lot of heatsink-heat-pipe-fan options "out there", and many good ones, because this has become an extremely competitive market with many sellers trying to capture loyalty from a select but growing number of buyers.
If you look hard enough, you can find some very exotic and compact coolers of Japanese manufacture, with the heatpipe coiled like a cinnamon roll; and there is another design out there that implements a sophisticated and refined heatpipe concept, but I cannot remember the name, unfortunately.
I took a look at this cooler, seeking a path of least resistance and web-research effort to find out what people were saying about it at NewEgg. I agree with many that buyer reviews at reseller-sites are not always to be trusted, but, like researching the Kennedy assassination, it is worth examining the folklore as well as the fact.
Here's what one user says:
With a stock AMD 2600+ barton cooler my temps were 58C at idle and 70C at load, this is without any air conditioning in my room and the ambient temperature being at 82 F living in Atlanta. Now with the Aerocool HT-101 HSF with the fan it came with I get temps of 51C idle and 54C at load still without air conditioning! I also lapped the heatsink to a mirror shine and applied Artic Silver 5. It's a whole 16C @ load difference!
I have said before -- and qualify my remark as just another opinion -- an important benchmark for a CPU-cooler design is how well it clamps the load temperature down closer to the idle value. We know where this guy lives; one imagines a "Neo of Matrix" living in a sweatbox apartment, giving his all to his computer at the expense of buying a window-swamp-cooler. What we don't know is what sort of load test he's running, or even if he means "load" to be amping up his Task Manager "Peformance" tab to show "100%" CPU usage. So there are no guarantees. Except for one thing: the cooler knocked his idle value down by 7C or something just under 14F, and it drove down his load value by 16C or nearly 28F . . . IF you are willing to risk a chance that the folklore later tests "FALSE". Just for speculation, figure a linear relationship of the idle value with the room value, so if you never let your home get warmer than 75F, knock off another 7F from his apres-AeroCool 51C -- so his idle value would then be around 48C @ 24C room temperature. All I can say is that after visiting these forums and spending some time with the AMD geeks, I've been amazed at how warm those AMD CPU's get, so this doesn't seem too extraordinary.
Find some more reviews to confirm with serious benchmark tests using the same test-bed, controlled room-temperature and comparisons with other models. But based on the "folklore", I'd say it is definitely worth looking into . . . . 82F is 7F beyond the point when we here in Southern California turn on the AC during mid-summer in the post-Enron era. The guy in Atlanta -- as his story goes -- has definitely given this cooler the "cat on a hot tin roof" test.
