The bottom is polished to a more mirror-like finish than any other heatsink I have ever had. It also felt very smooth like a mirror and that will certainly help heat tranfer. That fan controller is also the largest fan controller I've ever seen. These people do not think small! But it does give you control over the fan speed if the top speed is too loud for you. I'm one who cannot tolerate a too-loud fan and especially one that whines as most Delta fans do. This one did not have that whine I'm happy to say and it was tolerable at top speed, but you can hear it. If it's too loud for you simply use the fan controller to slighly lower the speed till you cannot hear it.

Like I said, this is the largest heatsink I've ever had and of the 3 motherboards I have here it only fit the Shuttle AK-31. It would not fit an Epox 8k3ae or a Gigabyte GA-7VAX because the capacitors were in the way. Look at the above picture, it barely fit the Shuttle AK-31. I had to go slowly with it and then guided it over the front motherboard catch and even then I had to gently push the Novasonic heatsink more towards the rear to get it to fit.

The design is actually rather simple. It's all aluminum but with a few interesting design twists that Novasonic used from advice from various people around the net including PCA's own nexus_7. It has 23 thick fins on each side but the more interesting part I cannot show you unfortunately. But you can get a good idea from the picture below.

Around the center the heatsink has a "V" shape, but upside down. Heat rises up that "V" and the fan blows it aways more easily thanks to this design (in theory). That is part of that mirror-like bottom and the fins are around that and the idea is that design along with the fast fan, mirror-like bottom and all the aluminum will make for a good cpu cooler and one that they say is for "an overclocked environment". Since they say it's for overclockers I'll see how it does againt an AX-7.

The unique design of the Novasonic, called "pyramid-extruded base" eliminates a common problem with most other CPU coolers. When you have a fan blowing air down on a CPU cooler with a flat base, you get a section of static pressure buildup right above the CPU core -- the middle of the fan is not moving any air because the motor is there, so basically you end up with a pillar of hot, pressurized and static air sandwitched between the fan and the base of the heatsink. The novasonic uses a pyramid-extruded base, which disperses this pillar of air and allows for more complete circulation, thus dramatically enhancing efficiency. Another benefit of this design is less noise.

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