Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO (120mm)

Ill get to the point- great cooler, it cools my x6 1055t overclocked to 3.2ghz at 18 degrees c while I am typing this review.

The box is great and comes with all the parts that are needed.

A little bit fussy to install but overall great.

The fan is almost silent and I can hardly hear it.

You can mount it upright or sideways

If you have Corsair Vengeance RAM in the closest slot to the cpu, it will fit horizontally but you will have to move the fan up about 1.5 cm. that does NOT decrease performance. same with Dominator RAM.

I am getting very low temps indeed and will overclock to 3.4/3.6 so its a 5 star product.
P.S dont remove the greenish layer on the backplate- thats so it doesnt short out the board.

The Short n' sweet

This cooler is quiet. But it's very tall. ( > 158.5 mm above the processor is required )

Access to the underside of the Motherboard is needed.

The Good. The Cooler is quiet and narrow. I had a small mother board to work with.

for eg these wouldn't fit. Zalman Ultra Quiet CPU Cooler with Dual Mount Support And Nexus Low-7000 R2 Low Profile CPU Cooler : LOW-7000 R2 Yet both are quiet and efficient.

This Coolers width = 77mm with the supplied fan fitted, without it's 51mm.

The height of the pipes means it clears ram which on smaller Motherboards can be an issue. Since this was the problem with the install I undertook today, I'll add the proviso that I swapped the fan around so it sucked through the fins rather than blew, as it would have been a tight fit against the 'tall' finned ram fitted.

I could have made it work - although I would have had to ( c/o Heath Robinson ) fixed the fan to the cooler without using the supplied bracket.

Swapping the fan around from the front to back - and in this case from blow to suck made more sense, as the cooler is designed for a double fan set-up anyway, ( and the kit includes mounts for a second fan - not supplied ) This meant air movement was kept front to back as I was fitting a front fan ahead of the hard drives.

Mounting to the Motherboard is more demanding than the bog standard click fit coolers. If you're reasonably competent with a screw driver it's not a problem ( and lets face it if your opening up your computer-ma-bob you really should be shouldn't you? ) I found it easier to attach and better engineered than similar products I've fitted. All have required the Motherboard to take out / or a Case that has a access hole under the Motherboard.

Contact paste is provided.

The Bad. The cooler is really tall. It will suit a full tower case. BUT Not all 'Tower' cases are made equal however...

Measure the width of your case from the processor on the board, to metal of the case side.

You'll need more than 158.5mm

And that .5 is important.

So on the one hand the cooler is narrow meaning it clears other components, but so tall it could well foul the side of an average PC case.

For the record I needed an extra mm or two.

( Following methodology is not guaranteed to work for anyone else or any other case, and may cause personal injury and irreparable damage to you and or your PC case )

...it wasn't hard to achieve with a hammer. I'm not joking, using a tea towel to soften the blows and against the carpet, I gently hammered on the perforated section where a fan can be mounted, this created a slightly dished/raised area which gave me the millimetre or so to clear the copper tips that protrude from the main aluminium body.

In conclusion buyer beware, measure the space you have in your chosen case before committing, if you have the width available then this is a excellent quiet cooler.

My experience is based on the i5 3570k @4.3 + 4.6 GHz

The stock cooler is more than good enough upto 4 Ghz, and is 'acceptable' but hot at 4.2, however it responds poorly to increases in voltage and associated heat. This is where an aftermarket cooler comes in, the 212 evo in this case. Put simply, unless you're going to shovel on the voltage, which the majority of us don't bother for another 100 or 200mhz - this cooler, even with a single fan in push, will cope easily, even under linpack-type burnmarks.

I use this at 4.3 with a +.005mv offset and all energy states, etc, enabled, the cooler was good for 4.6 as I increased voltage somewhat, but this is wholly variable depending on what your chip is like.

The fan is average, and will be audible under full load (but above your GPU, and case fans?), like most fans that don't cost a small fortune, however there's no annoying pitches or whines. It has a black ribbon cable, 4 pin pwm, and is of a usable length.

There is fitting provided for another 120mm fan.

4 stars, because it does the job, aesthetics could be better though.

***Don't forget the stock cooler blows air at your VRM heatsinks, make sure your VRMs have some airflow as tower coolers don't typically give them any.