The new 120M revision of Thermalright's Spirit 120 is a very welcome addition to their huge air cooling line up. Perfect to be installed in cramped cases and still being able to easily outperform the boxed cooler. Even for it's small size it kept our hexacore Intel CPU cool enough to warrant safe operating temperatures during the Prime95 tests.

The included fan is well balanced, providing enough airflow at a very acceptable noise level. The fan is audible, but the noise level is far from the noise we are used when having installed one of them all in one liquid cooling units.

Due to the slanted heat pipe design it's one of the few air coolers that allowed us to fill up all four slots on the socket 1155 test platform. Currently we are already testing coolers from the competitors, that sorta copied the concept of the slanted heatpipes of the True Spirit 120M.

The mounting system needs a small revision to make it more compatible with current motherboards. Thermalright has been able to reproduce our findings and will slightly alter the design.

At first glance, the True Spirit 120M seems like a minuscule tower air cooler. Not much differentiating it from the other tower variants. However the case compatibility and good thermal versus noise ratio, are both very high. In the cooling department the True Spirit 120M stands it ground. Choosing a good air cooler is not always about finding the best thermal performance. Many tower air coolers only allow the installation of two DIMMs, the 120M has got you covered there. The retail price is also pretty decent. Retailing at just sub 40 euros it falls in a very popular price range, with loads of competition, hence why the above argumentations need to be taken into consideration for your next purchase

The Thermalright True Spirit 120M is a great cooling unit, with fairly good thermal dissipation performance. While it might not bring you the most optimal operating temperatures, it has other cards down it's sleeve. This is why Madshrimps crew likes to award it with the novelty award:

PROS:

• Good balance between size and thermal performance
• Slanted heatpipe design for optimal RAM compatibility
• Included fan
• Optional clips for 2nd fan included
• Competitive price tag

CONS:

• Small revision required for maximum mobo compatibility

We would like to thank Amber Lin from Thermalright for providing us with the True Spirit 120 review sample.