As far as performance goes, this cooler is an excellent $35 well spent. What I've found with other direct contact heatpipe coolers, even this one, is that the idle temperatures are almost always superb. This is due to the very quick heat transfer rate of the cooler, thanks for the direct interface between the CPU and the cooler. Coolers without direct contact heatpipes require that the heat from the processor travel through an additional interface (the base itself) before making it to the heatpipes.