Opening up the box reveals the cooler, well protected in soft foam on all sides. With the cooler, you get a manual, and the necessary mounting screws and equipment, including a grounding wire. The manual provided is concise and helpful.


As you can see, the aluminum cooler is finished in an attractive bright blue. It has a very sturdy, one might even say heavy, feel to it and is very solidly built. Ultra chose to use low-airflow large fins on the cooler for heat distribution, and did a good job maintaining a high surface area for most efficient cooling. It's a pretty big cooler, so it must be installed in a 5.25” bay, rather than the normal 3.5”, but that shouldn't be any inconvenience.


The engineers over at Ultra did a great job coming up with a way to ensure contact with the hard drive's surface. There are actually two pieces to this cooler, the center and the side pieces with heatpipes, connected by tension screws. Obviously you won't be slathering Arctic Silver on your hard drive, but it is smart to have tension screws to make sure there isn't a big hot pocket of air in between the hard drive and the cooler. The heatpipes are also very cleanly constructed. But are they useful? Let's put a hard drive on this thing and find out.