Introduction

For those of you who like me have seen just about eighty to ninety percent of all CPU coolers made in the last five to ten years, you see a few coolers that are essentially the same as a few others that are already available. This is one of those instances. I have personally seen this cooler shipped out from three different manufacturers up to now and one of those three is bringing it back to life again.

Jumping into my Way Back machine and setting a course for about this time in 2009 we see the release of the ExtremeGear HP-1216, which used this exact cooler just in a more natural state of aesthetics. Spin the dial ahead another year and we see the EFFIZIO from SilenX, which had a slightly different fin shape, but is the same cooler under it all. Around that same time Spire released the TherMax Eclipse in its original form.

So just with Spire alone there has already been another version of this design since the original TherMax Eclipse released. This would be the TherMax Eclipse II. Shockingly throughout this process, there have been absolutely no changes done to anything in the cooler design, it is more or less a choice of fans that makes the difference between the TME and TME II, not even the hardware was changed. Sort of as a punch to the gut of cooler design, Spire is releasing the same cooler again in its third incarnation of the TherMax Eclipse CPU cooler.

The cooler we get to look at today is the Spire TherMax Eclipse III or TME III as you will see on the packaging. Once again we are left with the same exact tower design as the previous two TME coolers and again the only major change to the cooler is the choice of fans accompanying this cooler.

Hang tight as we look through quite a bit of "been there; done that" and see what sort of performance this old tower with new fans brings in terms of performance and see what sort of sound levels we have to deal with to obtain said performance.