Rosewill RCX-SC1U 1U CPU Cooler Review

Recently one of our clients needed a server built up but had some very limited space constraints.  The server could be more than 2U in height but needed to have 4 hard drives in it.  We based the build on an Intel Xeon E3-1220. The TDP of this processor is 80 Watts so it isn't some heat generating monster and is actually pretty efficient when it comes to power usage.  A case of this of this limited height has some serious space constraints internally.  The stock cooler from intel wouldn't fit because it was trying to take up some of the space that one of the hard drives needed.  We opted for a Rosewill RCX-SC1U a small 1U heatsink and fan.  The entire heatsink is made of copper and the fan is designed to pull air in through the heatsink and eject out of the vent on the top.  This is really nice because we can focus where we want the heat to go and make it work with the fans already in the case.  The installation of this little cooler was a snap and thanks to reading some of the reviews online we avoided some potential work.  Apparently the glue that they use on the sticker that protects the bottom of the heatsink likes to leave a lot of residue behind.  We used a heat gun to get the heatsink nice and hot then removed the sticker with out a problem.  We performed some stress tests on the CPU to make sure that the cooler would be able to keep up with the demand and it performed perfectly, the CPU was at 100% for about an hour and never climbed over 72C.  We could occasionally hear the motherboard ramping the speed of the CPU fan up in order to compensate and it was very noticeable, though it was relatively quiet when running at idle and under normal operation. This cooler was designed for a server case and to that length we are very happy with it's performance and would recommend it for that kind of usage.