ZEROtherm has been producing products for a little bit now in Korea but they haven`t been available in the United States until recently. They specialize in cooling products for computers. Established in July of 1999, they are ready to go global with their line of coolers. Today we`re going to look at one of their unique coolers. The ZEROtherm BTF90 is an all cooper cooler that fits Socket 775, AMD Socket 754,940,939, and AMD Socket AM2 processors. Does this artistic cooler do a good job at keeping your computer cool?



The BTF90 comes complete with the cooler, thermal paste, and two brackets. Depending on the CPU you are installing on, you`ll be installing one of the brackets on the bottom. But before we get to that let`s take a look at the cooler. As you can see, the cooler is shaped like a butterfly if you look at it from the top. Why the butterfly design? Well from the companies` website:
So the butterfly design was to be incorporated into our first product because it represents our first flight into the retail market, but also like a butterfly, our company APACK was changing from a very comfortable OEM market to the very open world-wide market.
I think the butterfly design gives this cooler a nice unique look and something that the company can use to market. As long as it doesn`t impede performance, why not go for something a little different? The copper wings meet in the middle where a red plastic column also has a slot to hold the fan. When you look from the front, you can see it`s a pretty tall cooler with over 40 fins.



A very shiny aluminum plated copper base sits at the bottom of the cooler. When taking the picture, I had to come at it from an angle because it was so reflective. The 4mm thick base is the source of where four 6mm heat pipes connect to. The heat pipes flow up the middle of the wings and are folded at the top whereby doubling the number of heat pipes that carry the heat away from the CPU. Four screw holes in the corner of the base unit lets you attach on of the brackets to mount the cooler on the motherboard.

To help cool the unit down, there`s a 92mm fan that sits in the center of the cooler. You can easily remove the whole fan unit by sliding it up away from the middle. It easily locks into place when you put it back in. Should you need to replace the fan, it would seem like an easy operation as long as ZEROtherm sells replacements. When running, there`s a red LED that glows behind the fan. A four pin fan header connects the fan the motherboard and the wire is of generous length. In fact, the wire almost looks like the tail of the butterfly.

The nice thing about the AMD bracket is that it`ll fit pretty much all the current sockets available. The Intel socket 775 bracket features the four spring loaded screws and it`s used in conjunction with a motherboard bracket. You`ll have to take apart your computer if you plan on putting this in a current socket 775 build. There`s an adhesive that helps hold the motherboard bracket in place. When installing you can use the included thermal paste should you not have any onhand. I would`ve liked to have seen more included as I ran out of paste trying to install the cooler on my AM2 CPU. While smaller CPUs will be fine, large surface area CPUs such as the AMD will need a few more dabs of paste. With that, I suggest picking up another tube as the included thermal paste isn`t enough.

Installation of this cooler can be problematic though for some motherboard...