The 212 Plus is the larger brother of the TX3, though there are several differences between the two. The 212 Plus is aimed at the individual who is looking for a little bit more performance, but doesn’t want to give up the bank to do it. Coolermaster accomplished this by giving the 212 Plus more surface area and four heat pipes to conquer the dreaded enemy named heat. We know this is enough to outperform the smaller brother, but is it enough to compete against the other big dawgs on the market?
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Today’s review sample was originally a pretty good cooler in its earlier days. The Mugen cooler was a favorite of many reviewers that had the pleasure of reviewing it. Performance was right there with the Noctua NH-U12P, Tuniq Tower 120 and many others we regarded as very good coolers. However, the new version is not only compatible with the new Intel i7 processor, but is heavier, taller and comes with a better performing cooling fan. Is it enough to put it at the top of the list with the likes of the Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme and the new Zalman CNPS 9900 LED? We shall see.
For many of us, the economic hard ships are knocking at out door. Chances are you are trying to make your computer last another year till you get your big raise. The perfect way to do this is do a bit of overclocking on your CPU. You certainly don’t want that crappy stock cooler keeping your CPU from overheating after this, but you also don’t want to spend a mint on a nice top of the line cooler. Chances are you fall into the consumer who is looking at the OCZ Vendetta 2.
DeepCool’s IceBlade Pro heatsink is Xigmatek-esq looking exposed heatpipe base CPU cooler with a dark nickel plating over every inch. The IceBlade Pro is built around four 8mm diameter copper heatpipes which conduct heat to the aluminum cooling fins above. Exposed heatpipe heatsinks are good with CPUs that have large integrated heat spreaders and large silicon die’s below (to spread the heat around). One or two 120mm fans can be mounted to either side of the cooler, and rubber vibration absorbing posts are supplied along with extra fan clips. A single 120mm PWM fan that operates at 900-1500RPM is supplied.
At the heart of the Thermaltake ISGC-200 heatsink is a glossy white impeller that vaguely resembles the petals of a daisy. The tips of the fan blades have a little notch taken out, supposedly this reduces noise by 3% too. The ISGC-200 heatsink itself stands 140mm tall, weighs 470 grams and accommodates one 92mm PWM fan that spins at 600~1600 RPM. If I didn’t know better I’d say the ISGC-200 was released for Intel’s new socket 1156 formfactor processors, except that it isn’t actually compatiblea with these chips at all. Instead it supports AMD 939-through to-AM3 and Intel 775 processors.
Another company that is not as popular in the U.S. as it is in Asia is allowing us to review their tower design cooler. Evercool is the one of the largest cooler manufacturers in Taiwan. Regardless of their lack of popularity in the U.S. looking around the net I saw several reviews about their previous and they all performed pretty well. Not in order to make a bigger name for themselves here in the U.S. Evercool sent us two of their newest coolers, the one we will presenting to you today is the Transformer 4. This new cooler is capable of handles all the newest processors from AMD and Intel as well as each’s older processors. And with the dual fan setup the Transformer is looking to be a cool to be wrecking with. And look good doing it.
Every laptop has its own method for keeping cool but the question comes up as to how you can enhance that cooling and maybe make your laptop a little easier to use. Well the Choiix design does a little bit of both. Additional cooling comes in the form of 2x 60mm fans that consistently keep fresh air flowing under the laptop. The additional elevation also helps to tilt the laptop keyboard a few degrees to give you better access to the keys.
Quite frankly I’d be concerned about the longevity of any graphics card that was cycled through such high temperatures on a regular basis. Naturally, this all precludes overclocking, which is a shame, because these new 55nm GPUs have a considerable potential in that regard. Ultimately then, there is only one solution to this dilemma… water-cooling.
ThermoLab’s Baram CPU cooler represents the company’s first foray into the performance cooling arena, and they’ve done a good job. The fit and finish is excellent and the design is fundamentally sound. Cooling performance is also very good, until the voltage is raised anyway. Even then, it’s much better than the OEM cooler but falls a bit behind most of the other coolers in the comparison.
If you’re sitting on a monster CPU you know the importance of keeping it nice and cool. Most overclockers and high end users know about aftermarket CPU coolers. Unfortunately, a large percentage of end users never give it a second thought. We’ve seen systems come directly from major websites with the wrong CPU cooler, too small a CPU cooler and pieces of plastic stuck between the CPU and the Cooler. CPU cooling bares a little thought and scrutiny. If you’re still sitting a stock CPU cooler on your CPU, perhaps you should look up the term pre-planned obsolesce. That would be planning a part or component in such a way as to cause it to fail prematurely in order to get the end user to buy a new one. Well, stock CPU coolers aren’t quite that bad, but they’re close. In a lot of years we’ve never really seen a stock CPU cooler that cools the CPU properly and none have ever provided and measure of overclocking headroom.
