CPU Air Cooler Roundup: Six Coolers from Noctua, SilverStone, be quiet!, and Cooler Master
by Dustin Sklavos on March 14, 2013 2:40 AM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
- Cooler Master
- SilverStone
- cooling
- Noctua
- be
Conclusions, Part 2
The second set of conclusions are for be quiet!'s ninja, the Dark Rock Pro 2, along with Cooler Master's stellar budget performer, the Hyper 212 EVO.
be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 2
The biggest problem with be quiet!'s Dark Rock Pro 2 is that it's incredibly hard to find in the United States. At present, the only place you can get it as NCIXUS, and NCIXUS isn't exactly well known for their competitive pricing. The Noctua NH-D14 was already a tough sell at $81, and as much as I love the Dark Rock Pro 2, I don't think it's worth the $20 premium. This is without a doubt one of the quietest and most efficient air coolers you can find, but until the price comes down the premium won't justify the slightly superior efficiency over the Noctua.
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Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO
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I'll confess I went into this part of the review with a little bit of a bias. While my experiences with Cooler Master's products have been mixed, the Hyper 212 coolers have generally been very well regarded. And why wouldn't they be? The Hyper 212 Plus and EVO employ basically the same direct touch heatpipe technology that made Xigmatek's HDT1283 such a crowd pleaser, and they're both incredibly affordable. Cooler Master is able to eke a tremendous amount of efficiency out of this design with just one good 120mm fan, and while the 212 EVO can be beaten by closed loop coolers or fancier air coolers, it's an easy sell to an enthusiast on a budget.
Conclusions
Fundamentally, what I'm left with are a series of coolers that at least, outside of SilverStone's unfortunately middle-of-the-road Heligon HE01, can all justify themselves in their own way. Users looking for a beefy air cooler will essentially find themselves choosing between the Noctua NH-D14 and be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 2, and under those circumstances I have to give the edge to Noctua based on price alone.
Meanwhile, users looking for a low profile cooler are probably going to be served fairly well by the NH-L12. The NH-L9i is certainly an upgrade over an Intel stock cooler, and I can imagine corner cases where a user will want one, but under most circumstances I just don't think it does enough to really merit purchase. If you need a low profile cooler and want some extra juice out of it, the NH-L12 is likely going to be the way to go.
Finally, as I mentioned before, I went into this review with a bias toward the Hyper 212 EVO and frankly, it delivered. The price-performance ratio of Cooler Master's Hyper 212 coolers is essentially bulletproof and speaks to the same type of user who overclocked not to hit records, but to get the most out of his or her limited investment. A build using a Hyper 212 EVO and an Antec GX700 enclosure, for example, may not be the most attractive system in the world, but it'll get a tremendous amount of mileage out of the buyer's money. Because the Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO is able to produce fairly competitive thermals without too much noise pollution, I'm happy to award it a Bronze Editor's Choice award.
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stennan - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - link
Hey Dustin, great review!Some friendly feedback: could you show some more pictures of the coolers tested earlier in review/roundup? It wasn't until the last page that the coolers were shown, also pictures of the cooler on the motherboard or in the case would be nice.
Keep up the work!
cbrownx88 - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - link
I'd buy a Noctua cooler in a heartbeat if they didtn have those god awful colored fans.cmdrdredd - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - link
You can use any 140mm fans you wantmapesdhs - Friday, March 15, 2013 - link
Thoroughly agree! I bought a Noctua NF-A15 140mm to replace the stock rear fan in a
Coolermaster HAF 932 case. The Noctua fan performs fantastically well, but the colour
scheme is horrible. Having said that, Noctua's packaging and presentation is very good.
Opening the fan pack feels like a special event, it all has a certain luxury sheen which at
least makes one feel the high price is going to be worth it.
Ian.
K1wi - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - link
I'd love the NH-L12 for a compact build as I'm a huge Noctua fan (best post-purchase support I've ever encountered), but it looks like it blocks the top PCI-e slot, so its a no-go for me. Its a pity because it looks like it only barely does... I wonder why they didn't choose to offset it to stay out of the PCI-e area and rather more over the top of the board where most ITX boards place their chipset stuff etc.That only leaves the NH-L9i, which is more about reducing noise than improving thermals :(
seven2nine - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - link
underEase of installation
first paragraph "surrounding all the coolers here but but...."
Lord 666 - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - link
After happily winning a z77 Sabertooth on Anandtech, was bummed my existing Zalman would not fit over the armor.Without a doubt, will the NH-D14 fit?
garadante - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - link
Honestly, these closed loop liquid cooler results aren't necessarily valid, as fifteen minutes of load testing probably isn't enough to thermally saturate the coolant. As soon as the coolant is thermally saturated, shouldn't the performance be based purely on the heat transfer of the radiators between the cooling medium, intake air, and the heat transfer medium, the coolant? At this point, I imagine a high end air cooler would perform more consistently in the long run.Liquid cooling really shines with actual cooling loops, built yourself, with high end components, large radiator surface area, and more coolant to thermally saturate than is present in these closed loop coolers. There's only so much heat a 120mm closed loop cooler can dissipate, once the coolant reaches it's thermal saturation point.
These closed loop coolers are better for bursts of activity, but I have my doubts with them in extended torture testing. Anyway, I'd rather use a 480mm radiatior, or even a 480 paired with a 240/360, so I can run the fans at nothing/almost nothing overnight, with the heat capacity of the coolant taking care of the cooling, the only sound coming from the pump.
ShieTar - Friday, March 15, 2013 - link
Potentially good point, but lets throw some numbers in to test it:Heat Capacity of water is about 4 J/g/K, so if the closed-loop system come with 1/4l of water (I doubt it is more than that), they can take 1 kJ/K. The overclocked 2700K can possibly touch 100W when overclocked and stressed, so it puts out enough power to heat up the water by 1K every 10 seconds, or 90K over 15 minutes if you ignore the cooling effect of its radiator.
With this amount of power I would guess that this small, closed-loop systems are already relatively saturated and stable. Of course if you have a big system with 4 liters of water and a few Kg of radiator metal, you are looking at a much higher heat capacity of more than 20kJ/K, and if you just use normal loads (~50W) instead of a torture test, you could indeed cool for an hour or two on heat capacity alone. If you add an overclocked 680 or 7970 to the loop though, even this big system should hit saturation within much less than one hour.
mapesdhs - Friday, March 15, 2013 - link
I talked to a German company which specialises in water cooling. They told me that to achieve
cooling performance "significantly better" than a high-end air cooler would require one to spend
at least 200 UKP ($300+). Otherwise, unless there are other considerations, a water cooler is
not going to beat a good air cooler.
This is why I keep bagging used TRUEs, etc. off eBay when I can, typically get them with
fans included for around 10 to 17 UKP. Also just bought a Venomous-X for only 25 UKP total.
Ian.