With all of the advancements made in the arena of CPU cooling, the basic idea is still very much the same. Heat is extracted from the CPU and transferred to a heatsink. The heatsink must be cooled so that its temperature remains lower than that of the CPU which allows more heat to be extracted from the CPU. We all know there are three major forms of CPU cooling; Air, Water, and Phase Change. It wasn't to long ago that water and phase change cooling were considered only for the extreme overclockers. While phase change units remain very expensive, water cooling has become a huge industry. Just about everyone is making some kind of kit that can be assembled with no leaks and no hassle. But water cooling still isn't for everyone, nor is it practical to use in every PC enclosure -- especially those with very little internal space and airflow. By replacing the typical air-cooled heatsink with a waterblock,  you are removing a very important point of circulation in an enclosure which is used to circulate air around critical motherboard components. Such as the Northbridge and power regulation MOSFET arrays.

     As we saw in our trip to Las Vegas for the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show, there is a huge industry focus on the home media PC. These computers are being made to be placed in the heart of the home entertainment center. Naturally, anything put into this kind of environment needs to be fairly quiet, so those CPU coolers of yesteryear that made more noise than a jet aircraft during takeoff would be very inappropriate. On the overall, consumers have less acceptance of loud PC components so more manufacturers are tailoring their products to offer maximum efficiency to capitalize on minimum noise.

     Gigabyte has been working on their own line of CPU coolers for quite some time. The cooler we have here is called the G-Power Lite, and is a slightly toned down version of the G-Power Pro. In contrast, The G-Power Pro has 4 heat pipes and a drive-bay mounted fan controller that can regulate the speed between 1700 - 3200 rpm which produces 36.2 - 68.5 CF/m at the cost of 21.3 - 40.1dBA of noise. The G-Power Lite is a little more on the finesse side of cooling. Based on only 3 heat pipes, and with a fixed fan speed of 2450 RPM or 2000 RPM, selected by using an inline speed regulator. This produces 48.5 CFM or 21 CFM while only producing  27.5 dBA or 23.1 dBA of noise.