COOLER MASTER V6 GT 120mm DynaLoop CPU Cooler w/ Universal bracket & Dual Fan - Retail

After a failed installation of an intel stock cooler, the V6 GT was the chosen replacement from all the coolers available on amazon.co.uk. The deciding factors were appearance and online reviews. Despite the high price of £54, this thing stands out from the crowd on looks and performance comparisons basically show very little difference in temperatures between the best performers.

Upon receipt it was clear from the packaging alone that this was an item CoolerMaster were proud of. Installation began immediately, and the instructions provided were more than adequate to install this cooler quicklyand correctly. The mounting brackets were easy to work with, and the problems of wiggle, installation difficulty and general space issues seen online were not evident in this installation.

Final mounting is best done outside of the case. The two screws holding the heat sink to the board are a real pain to tighten with an allen key, especially with limited space.

The cooler looks awesome inside the case, and makes a fair amount of noise. This is no problem if you have loud music playing, or if you are in a different room watching TV, so the noise is only a problem for people who enjoy silence. Playing Rage for several hours shows that the Intel i7 2600K stays cooler than the GPU of the ASUS GTX 580, around 50C for the cores compared to 55C for the GPU. Prime95 Blend tests give a CPU temp of no more than 60C.

If you want a big, awesome looking air cooler to cover most of your board which will possibly block one memory slot if you have tall memory, and if you have a black and red, blue or purple theme to your case, and if you can find them - then you will like owning this cooler. I know I do.

First off, I bought this cooler as a temporary replacement while i rebuild my water loop. I found it as an open box special at Frys so I picked it .

The first thing that really drew me to this cooler was the way it looked. The plastic top and fan covers do a good job making the cooler look clean which is a huge plus for me since I am not really keen on the the exposed pipes/radiator fins like on the Hyper 212 (but some of you may hate the additional plastic thats all over heat sink). The V6GT also comes with 2 120mm fans that are also very easy to change out for other fans (I tossed in some HS Yate Loons I had lying around), however the fan brackets felt really flimsy which lead me to question how many times i could take them on and off before I would break them...

Now for the installation. I understand that most aftermarket heat sinks have tougher than most installations and the V6GT is no exception. I installed it on an AM3 board which is a 3 piece installation (a back plate, a front plate, and the "hold down" bar). If you install it on an Intel board, the installation is different and may be a little easier or harder. When actually mounting the cooler to the motherboard, you have to remove both the fans and even after that, you do not get a good angle at the screws which you need to tighten to secure the cooler to the mother board. CM does supply you with a small allen key (which eliminates this screwdriver angle issue), but i could not get my hand down far enough to use it. You probably could take off the big piece of plastic on the top of the cooler but I did not see an easy way to do that and the instructions did not say to do it either so I went ahead and pressed on.

Somthing else to note is the size and weight of this cooler. Most of us know when we buy a after market cooler that size could be an issue but this cooler covers one of my ram slots (I have low profile RAM, so this does not affect me) and it interferes with the fan on the side of my case (well, it would interfere if I had it installed...). I have also heard some concerns about the wight of this cooler and how it affects your motherboard. I have not had this cooler installed for long, but (from my experience with other heavy coolers) if you install the mounting hardware correctly, then you should not have an issue.

Finally, performance. I have it cooling an AMD Ph II 955 BE at 3.8 GHZ 1.46V. It idles at 32 C and peaks at 48 C after 6 hrs of P95. Of course, this cooler performs no where near the custom water loop it is filling in for (28 C idle, 40 C after 6 hrs P95) but it does perfrom better than the old Corsair H50 that i had on it before the custom loop (32C idle, 53 C after 6 hrs P95). This cooler does perform on par with what I expected so these results do not suprise me.

There isnt really too much more I can say about this cooler. the LED strip isnt working (which seems to be a common issue....) but i really dont care about that. Also, yes, this cooler can be noisy but that depends on the fans you put with it. HS Yate Loons are very loud at full blast but i have them connected to a fan controller so I can make it whisper quiet when I am not doing anything that is CPU intensive.

If you are looking at this cooler, I recommend it.