So, Thermalright engineers not only made a smaller heatsink, they also managed to more evenly distribute the heat over its plate array:

The aluminum heatsink plates are soldered to the heatpipes.

The heatpipes lie in special grooves in the cooler base and are also soldered to it. The thinnest part of the base measures 2mm.

The base is 40x50mm and is finished like all other Thermalright solutions: you can see and feel the machine marks on it:

Those of you who like mirror-shining polish will have to work on this base pretty hard. As for the evenness of the base surface of our Thermalright Ultra-120 A cooler, it is OK. It is not ideal, of course, but at least this cooler features the best base of the five models we got our hands on. Nevertheless, one of the base corners was lower than the rest. As you can see, the thermal compound imprint on the processor heat-spreader is not perfect:

Later on we checked it on the glass surface and confirmed that this is where the base is slightly bent upwards. Nevertheless, since our 45nm test CPU – Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 - has very small contact area I decided not to level out the base. In fact, the finishing touches for the base of Thermalright coolers, such as leveling them out and polishing off nicely, could be a topic for a separate article, and we are going to continue talking about it in our upcoming reviews.