Although water cooling is becoming a mainstream solution, air cooling is still the most user friendly and efficient cooling solution. Thermalright is one of the pioneering cooler manufacturers today, with its renowned SK-6 heatsink as undoubtedly one of the best ever made.

Although the SK-6 has great performance, it was really quite heavy. So, Thermalright decided to produce something lighter, while maintaining the great performance level of the original SK-6. SK-6 AB is one of the resulting variants - it uses an aluminium base to reduce weight. In addition, there's also the CB-6L which is a lower-end version of the SK-6 series, targeted at mid-end users.

The CB-6L

The heatsink is made of aluminium and plated with nickel. It has a copper base soldered to the main aluminium block. The sample I received was a pre-release model. Even the fan screws were missing! :)

I was astonished that the "For Professional Overclocker" label was printed beside the box! It's obvious that you can't use this cooler to overclock much higher than you already can with your stock heatsink. The CB-6L is rated for AMD Duron / Thunderbird (Socket A) processors of 1GHz & above. This cooler should be able to handle the 1.4GHz Athlon but the temperature will be unacceptably high. Clearly, the CB-6L is targeted at users who are looking for a cooler that doesn't make much noise but yet performs well at stock speed.

This early sample comes with a standard mounting clip and a 60x10mm fan. No thermal pad/paste, manual or instruction sheet were included.

Specifications