Once again we?re turning our attention to small form factor hardware, something I think people are going to become more and more interested in over time. Whether building your own Steam Box, or an HTPC for your living room, you are going to need to be aware of the specialized hardware that is available for these specific needs.

Today we?re looking at the ITX30 CPU cooler from ThermoLab. You may not have heard of this company, but they have been around for over 10 years now, making retail and industrial thermal products. Since their products are rarely seen outside Korea, it makes sense that one would be unfamiliar with them.

The ITX30 fits the specific niche of being a cooler designed for Intel CPUs that is no more than 30mm in height. We actually reviewed a very similar product, the Noctua NH-L9i, a while back. That cooler was 37mm tall with a fan, so the ITX30 pushes specs even further. Of course we'll be comparing the two by the end of this review, to see if either one is capable of cooling a Haswell based Core i3 CPU with the lowest amount of noise possible.