Remember Thermaltake's high-end Frio CPU cooler? We first laid eyes on an early prototype build back at Computex in June 2009.
Back then, Thermaltake's internal benchmarks suggested the cooler could provide CPU temperatures roughly 10°C lower than a leading competitor. Bold claims, but with not a word spoken in regards to the cooler's progress in the following six months or so, we'd began to lose interest.
Fortunately, if you happen to think Frio - which by the way is Spanish for cool - has potential, it's now ready for a little more limelight ahead of a March 2010 release.
Thermaltake's cooler, pictured above, is said to "perform exceptionally well even during overclocking" and features five 8mm heatpipes connected to a nickel-coated mirror base and an array of aluminium fins.
Supported CPU sockets include Intel LGA1366, LGA1156 and LGA775, as well as AMD's AM3. We don't yet have any real-word performance numbers, but Thermaltake tells us that it managed to overclock a 3.33GHz Intel Core i7 975 Extreme Edition processor up to 4.2GHz - not bad going for an air cooler, and illustrative of Frio's claimed 220W heat dissipation capacity.
Expect to see it at next month's CeBIT, and then in stores toward the end of March priced at a competitive $59.99 excluding local US taxes. Want a closer look? Check out the following introductory video with Thermaltake's marketing manager Thore Welling: