Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO CPU Cooler (RR-212E-20PK-R1)

Introduction:

This is a very cool cooling for Cooler Master. They have managed to price is extremely well, while maintaining great cooling performance. It has been able to keep my 3570K at 4.2ghz at 50C while folding.

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Review:

This cooler is pretty straight forward. It has 4 copper heatpipes, that directly touch the CPU, this aids greatly in moving heat from the processor to the heatsink fins. The fins are placed fairly close together, but are still far apart enough to allow lots of airflow, and to keep it nice and cool.

Mounting the cooler was very easy with about 4 steps. The instructions have lots of pictures to explain how to mount it. It took me around three minutes in total to screw everything together and mount the cooler. It comes with some fairly decent thermal paste, but if you want the best cooling performance you may be better off looking for an aftermarket solution.

The cooler is fairly big, so it might not fit in some of those cheapo cases out there, but should fit in most performance mini towers, mid towers and full towers. I found on my P8Z77 that with both fans installed, it doesn't cover the ram slots at all, allowing very tall ram to be installed.

Now, I replaced the single fan with two fans off my V6GT, because the one that came with it was very slow (under 500RPM) for some reason. So I am using it in push/pull. It keeps my 3570K under 65C at 4.4ghz while folding, and under 90C running Intel Burn test.

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Conclusion:

Overall I am very impressed with this cooler. It offers excellent cooling performance at an insane price. Good job from Cooler Master!

I was initially excited by the reviews this EVO CPU cooler was receiving. One of the best CPU coolers for the price on the market. Sadly, when I received my cooler, I was met with multiple issues upon installation with my AMD Socket AM3+ motherboard.

NEGATIVES:

First, this model does not use the standard retention harness for AMD CPUs. The installation of this cooler required me to completely disassemble and remove my motherboard from my computer case to install a back plate on the bottom side of the motherboard. A two hour process to disassemble, install the cooler and reassemble my computer. Where if Cooler Master had simply used the standard AMD harness it would have taken about all of 5 minutes to install.

Upon having to remove the standard mount points on my motherboard and installing the back plate, I then discovered that the top half the retention harness bracket screws did not line up exactly with the back plate screw holes. I tried adjusting the screw holes on the back plate but there wasn't enough give to properly align the screw holes. Meaning the quality control of the retention harness was not exacting enough. As a result of this, after much effort, only 3 of the cooler's 4 screws are threaded properly into their screw sockets. The 4th is so off that even after applying great force the final screw will not line up to be fully screwed in. Thus the cooler is not applying as much down force onto the CPU's surface as designed, for what I can only surmise as giving me non-optimal cooling due to inferior Cooler Master quality control of its parts.

POSITIVES:

The cooler's installation instructions were clear and helpful. My overclocked quad-core AMD Phenom II X4 955 CPU runs at least 8-10C cooler at full load compared to my previous older Arctic Freezer 64 Pro cooler. Though I can't help but wonder how much better the cooling would be if the cooler was mounted 100% properly. Included with this cooler are additional anti-vibration rubber feet, installation brackets for a second 120mm fan in push-pull configuration (which I am using) and a small tube of CPU thermal paste. Though absent is a power splitter cable so that both CPU cooler fans can utilize a motherboard's temperature based dynamic fan RPM control via the same CPU fan power header.