Cooler Master is known for producing interesting cooling products that cover a varied range of performance and pricing. These same products are also rather varied in their looks, from wild shaped coolers with lights everywhere to more subdued coolers that are reminiscent of something seen in an OEM system.
Today we’re looking at the Hyper 212 CPU cooler; a cooler that bridges the gap between the subtle and the ostentatious. The cooler is a tower design that has multiple heat pipes running from a block on the CPU to two towers of cooling fins. These fins are then cooled by a large 120mm fan. That means this cooler is by no means subtle or small in stature, but may just turn out to be acoustically quiet. That’s something we’ll just have to find out, but lets start with the specifications chart. Full specifications and all product details can of course be found on the Hyper 212 product page.
Features and Specifications
The most noticeable thing from the specifications is the broad range of processor sockets that the Hyper 212 supports. From the Intel camp we have support for everything LGA775, from the Pentium 4 and Celeron up to the most current Core 2 platform. The AMD side of things is even more well covered, with support for socket 754, 939, and AM2. This gives the Hyper 212 ability to cool processors from the older Sempron right up to the latest Phenom. This is all fine and dandy, but one look at the brackets included with the Hyper 212 to give it this level of compatibility shows that it comes at a price, as both AMD and Intel processors will require the motherboard to be removed to install the cooler.
The weight is one other notable specification as the Hyper 212 rings it at a hefty 710 grams. Luckily Cooler Master took this into account when designing the afore mentioned mounting hardware for this cooler. The brackets are all metal, and are mounted to the motherboard without the use of any of the existing OEM plastic mounting brackets.
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What Else Is In The Box?
The Hyper 212 comes with more than just a few metal brackets though. Cooler Master provided a lot of kit with this cooler, including a whole lot of mounting hardware, washers, thermal paste, and an installation manual. Here’s a full rundown of what’s in the package.
- AMD and Intel mounting brackets
- Mounting screws, nuts, and a nut driver
- Fan bracket for additional fan
- Thermal paste
- Washers and insulating cushions
- Manual written in 17 languages
The thermal paste is of particular interest, as it doesn’t appear to be the typical white thermal grease included with most CPU coolers. It’s grey, has a much thicker consistency, and a appearance reminiscent of other premium compounds like Arctic Silver. Hopefully it boosts the performance of this cooler. We’ll have to see in the following pages.
Visual Inspection
As I noted earlier, the Hyper 212 cooler sports a tower design. It has four copper heat pipes exiting a copper base and interfacing with two blocks of aluminum fins. The fan is mounted vertically, perpendicular to the motherboard, and blows over the fans towards the back of the heatsink. This air is then ejected by either the second fan that can mounted to the back of the heatsink, or by the rear fan on the case.
Front to back, the Hyper 212 is only 98mm deep (just south of 3 7/8 inches). While this cooler isn’t very deep, it is very tall, with a height measuring 160mm (just under 6 5/16 inches). Add to that a width that follows the fan width and you have a cooler that although will fit in a shorter case, you’ll want to make you have plenty of room around the socket and from the socket to the side panel.
The back of the cooler is where you can really see the design come together. In an effort to increase the amount of surface area of the cooling fins, Cooler Master split them into two separate towers rather than make one solid set of fins. I’m not sure about the cooling efficiency of this design, as it would make more sense to have fins that span the entire length of the cooler. However, the lack of material in the middle is probably a contributor to the low price of the Hyper 212. That being said, Cooler Master does add a bracket for a second 120mm fan should your cooling come up short.
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Finally we get the bottom of the cooler, which is where all the action is. As you can see Cooler Master has polished the surface to a near mirror finish, which even shows through the protective cover. This should maximize amount of contact between the CPU and the cooling block on the Hyper 212. This is very important as it allows for more heat to be transferred more efficiently to the heat sink. We’ll have to see how all these design choices pan out in testing.
The Test Rig
To test the Cooler Master Hyper 212 CPU cooler, we installed it in the following system.
- Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 2.67GHz (stable OC of 3.2GHz)
- EVGA NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI Motherboard
- EVGA NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB PCIe Video Card
- 2GB (2x1024MB) Low Latency DDR2 Performance SDRAM at 800MHz
- Western Digital Raptor 150GB SATA 10,000 RPM Hard Drive (x2 in RAID0)
- Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer Sound Card
- NEC 18X Dual Layer DVD±RW/CD-RW Burner
These components were installed in an OEM mid-tower case sporting two 120mm fans, one each at the back and front, and one 92mm on the right side cooling the hard drives. The hardware side of things is powered by a 700W heavy duty power supply, and the software side is driven by Windows Vista Ultimate.
This rig was chosen primarily for it’s stock unlocked Core 2 Extreme processor. With an unlocked multiplier we were easily able to push the processor from it’s default 2.67GHz to a zippy 3.2GHz, and provide a sufficient thermal challenge for the Hyper 212. For benchmarking, I used version XII SP1 of SiSoftware’s Sandra package to pin the CPU at 100% CPU consistently for a set duration of time.
Before we get to the numbers, we need to take a look at how the Hyper 212 cooler fit into the rig.
Installation and Setup
Installation of the Cooler Master Hyper 212 cooler was fairly easy, and with the instructions by my side I was able to complete it in under an hour with only a few issues. Now it should be noted that for both AMD and Intel installations, the motherboard will need to be removed. So before we go ahead with that rather arduous process, lets take a look at what we’re starting with.
This little cooler looks at first like it’s passive and doesn’t sport any type of active fan, but there’s a power cable that leads to a 92mm fan sandwiched between the two cooling towers. While this is a good design and not unlike the Cooler Master Hyper 212, the 92mm fan in this OEM cooler sounds like a jet engine at top speed. It should be noted that the fan in the OEM cooler has a four pin connector, and can vary it’s speed based on the load and temperature of the CPU as reported by the motherboard. Since the Hyper 212 doesn’t sport this feature, we’re going to run both coolers at their top speed.
Now after having to tear apart most of my test rig, I managed to get the Hyper 212 cooler installed. Once it was in the system, I was able to really get a comparative look at how big the Hyper 212 is. On one side of the cooler, there’s only 1 cm or so between the cooling fans and the power supply. On the other side, the bottom fin is a hairs width away from the fins on the northbridge cooler. The backside of the Hyper 212 matches up almost perfectly with the cases rear fan, making a straight line for hot air to travel out of the case.
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The air did flow rather well once the system was powered up. The first thing that I noticed, or at least my ears noticed, was how quiet the Cooler Master Hyper 212 was at full speed in comparison to the OEM cooler I just removed. The second thing I noticed was the pretty blue lights. Not one to shy away from a trend, Cooler Master has put blue LEDs on the 120mm fan attached to the Hyper 212. This large, bright fan provided the Hyper 212 with some great results once we stopped staring at the pretty lights and got to work.
Before I get to the performance numbers, I need to address a couple issues with the installation. The first was also the weirdest issue I’ve ever seen. The large holes on the mounting brackets are reverse threaded; something that is present on both the Intel and AMD brackets. No mention is made of this in the manual, and it can be quite confusing for those of us used to “righty-tighty, lefty-loosey.” Upon further research, I dicovered this is required to keep the screws from being unscrewed when you are installed the cooler. The other gripe I have is the need to remove the mobo for both installations, AMD and INTEL. Let’s see how well this cooler did.
Performance Comparison
To test the Cooler Master Hyper 212 CPU cooler, we sealed our OEM case and started up the system at default clock speeds. We let the system run idle for 30 minutes, and took a reading to establish a stable idle temperature. We then loaded SiSoftware Sandra and spun up the computer burn-in scripts that are included. The purpose of these scripts is to push your entire system to it’s limit to ensure it’s stable. We simply chose the CPU based tests, which would pin the CPU at 100% on all four cores and give the Hyper 212 a good thermal workout. After an hour of slow roasting, we took the temperature of the CPU. Once this was done, we jacked up the processor speed to 3.2GHz and did it all over again. First here’s how the OEM CPU cooler faired.
The numbers posted by the Cooler Master Hyper 212 were more impressive than what I would expect from a mid range tower cooler. With the processor clocked at it’s default 2.67GHz there was a 6 degree performance difference between the OEM CPU cooler and the Hyper 212 CPU cooler at both idle and under load. This is a respectable difference, but not as impressive as the overclocked numbers. When we cranked the Core 2 Extreme up to 3.2GHz and pinned all four cores to 100% CPU usage, we liked what we saw. At idle the Cooler Master Hyper 212 posted a 7 degree drop in temps over the OEM cooler, and at load it dropped a rather big 10 degrees.
Acoustic performance is another area where we saw the Cooler Master Hyper 212 thoroughly trounce the OEM cooler in our test rig. These are the results posted by our digital dB meter, placed six inches away from the side panel directly above the area of the cooler.
- OEM CPU Cooler – 43 dBA (full speed)
- Cooler Master Hyper 212 CPU Cooler – 38 dBA
Now these numbers aren’t exclusively caused by the CPU coolers. There is some bleed over from the surrounding fans and components. Still the 5 dBA performance delta between the OEM cooler and the Hyper 212 translates into the difference between a maddening scream and a dull roar from. It’s safe to say the Hyper 212 qualifies as a quiet cooler.
These numbers do need to be taken as they are. Though a significant drop from an OEM cooler that is only designed to keep the processor from frying, the overall numbers posted by the Cooler Master Hyper 212 are only good within it’s own class of midrange coolers. That being said, the Cooler Master Hyper 212 is nice and quiet at full speed, and it managed to keep quiet while keeping the CPU cool.
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Final Thoughts and Conclusions
It would be hard to call the Cooler Master Hyper 212 CPU cooler the be all and end all of tower coolers, especially for a company like Cooler Master that is always improving and innovating. The engineering and design behind the Hyper 212 does put forth some interesting ideas, including the separate cooling towers and dual fans. The blue LEDs are a nice touch, and they have been known to attract hardware monkeys like a moth to flame. Performance wise, the Cooler Master is what you would expect from it’s class of coolers. It puts up numbers that are good enough to turn heads, and has enough overclocking overhead to keep the turned. But this isn’t a performance cooler.
The major benefit of the Cooler Master Hyper 212 CPU cooler, and it major point of interest, is that it’s quiet. Like many other tower coolers, the claim to fame of the Hyper 212 is it’s acoustics. Yes it can be used as a performance cooler in a pinch, but if you are the type who is seeking performance cooling, you likely are looking higher up Cooler Masters line and deeper into your pocket book. At $49.99 USD ($60.99 CDN) this is an inexpensive cooler that could easily fit into performance rig and keep it cool while keeping your sanity intact.
The Cooler Master Hyper 212 CPU cooler isn’t without it’s issues though. The minor annoyance of reverse threading the screws and not detailing it in the manual can cause you to loose 10 minutes of installation time, or it can cause you to loose your cool when you can’t figure out why the screws aren’t going in. As for the numbers posted, they are only slightly above average for a cooler in this range. This is most likely due to dual tower design, as many coolers in the same price class do tend to benefit from a solid design.
In the end those looking for an inexpensive quiet cooler that performs well and might give them a little overclocking overhead should they be feeling naughty one day will have a hard time turning away from the Cooler Master Hyper 212 CPU cooler. The Hyper 212 adds one more good cooling solution to the market, and it’s from a company known for good cooling solutions.
Pros
- New spin on the old tower cooler design
- Full array of accessories included
- Remains quiet while still posting good numbers
- Excellent price to performance ratio
- Oh, pretty lights
Cons
- Not much different from other tower coolers
- Performance numbers are only slightly above average
- New design hampers cooling performance
- Undocumented reverse threaded screws
Overall Rating: 8.0 / 10.0
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