CPU Cooler Buyers Guide

Overclocking? A great heatsink and fan will help you avoid a fried CPU

By David Murphy

You can’t just eyeball a cooler. The size of a fan doesn’t dictate its capacity for chilling your processor. We’ve tested huge models that do anything but, and we’ve put our hands on smaller devices that have blown the heat right out of our test rig. The only true way to evaluate a cooler’s prowess is to strap it over the top of your CPU and test it. But that’s easier said than done.

Here are a few tips to steer you in the right thermal direction. For starters, you should consider the total amount of heat dissipation a cooler has to offer, versus its actual ability to cool. What the heck does that mean?

A cooler with a great mass fins will heat up more slowly than one with equipped with less surface area for dissipating heat. But you need more than fins to prevent your processor from overheating; you must also consider the cooler’s fan’s capacity for drawing air over those fins. 

A big, bulky cooler with lots of fins trades size for noise reduction, because it can use a a fan that spins at low RPM. A cooler with  less surface area will fit in a smaller enclosure and is less likely to interfere with other components inside the case, but it will need a fan that spins much faster in order to pull in enough air. But a rapidly spinning fan can turn a quiet PC into a wind tunnel.

A cooling solution that combines lots of fins with a powerful fan will deliver the best of both worlds. You can easily quiet your PC by dialing back the fan speed in the BIOS, but you’ll never squeeze the best performance out of your CPU using an underwhelming cooler.

Alpine 7 Pro

Look no further for a gentle upgrade over your stock Intel cooler

Given its small size, we didn’t expect maximum cooling performance from Arctic Cooling’s Alpine 7 Pro. And while the Alpine 7 Pro doesn’t set any performance records, in some situations it does match the capabilities of our cooler of choice, Thermaltake’s DuOrb. Given the sheer size difference between this 9x9x3cm cooler and the, well, monstrous DuOrb, the Alpine 7’s performance was a pleasant surprise.

The Alpine 7 Pro does an exceptional job of cooling when your processor is idle—it even ran head to head with the DuOrb in this capacity. Both coolers dropped the temperature of all four cores of our Q6700 to 36 C, but when we cranked up our processor to 100 percent usage rates, the Alpine 7 faltered.

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Thermaltake DuOrb

This figure eight is great! 

Zalman’s CNPS9700 has been the Godzilla of coolers and a Best of the Best champion for more than a year. But it’s finally facing its Megalon in Thermaltake’s DuOrb cooler.

Unlike the CNPS9700, which has an 11cm fan strapped to the side of its imposing copper and aluminum frame, the DuOrb’s heatsinks are stretched out horizontally. The extra-wide cooler, shaped in a 20-centimeter-wide figure eight, comes with two 8cm blue and red LED fans tucked inside two rings of copper fins.

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Zalman CNPS9300 AT

Big power in a tiny package 

When we first got our hands on Zalman’s CNPS9300 AT, we assumed that the company had pulled a “Honey, I Shrunk the CPU Cooler” on its flagship product, the bulky CNPS9700. The CNPS9300 is 80 percent smaller, and its total thermal dissipation area has been nearly halved, from 5,490cm2 to 2,583cm2.

Logic dictates that this cooler should perform far worse than the CNPS9700. But the built-for-silence CNPS9300 AT nearly matches its big brother’s performance—as well as that of our top cooler, Thermaltake’s DuOrb.

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Cooler Master V8

A healthy cup of cooling for your CPU

Cooler Master’s V8 CPU cooler ameliorates a somewhat time-consuming installation process with near-record-setting performance for an air cooler. The sleek aluminum cooler’s 12cm fan sits between two heatsinks on the device, sparing fingers from the accidental nip of its 800rpm to 1,800rpm variable fan.

The V8’s installation process is similar to that of most other CPU coolers, but with a few more screws involved. On an Intel platform, you start by attaching two retention plates to the cooler itself. You then remove the motherboard from your case and flip it upside-down, matching the ends of the cooler’s four retention screws with the mobo’s holes. You balance this contraption in your lap while using four large nuts to secure this beast of a device in place. You can also use an included backplane to mount the device, but we found the nut method to be far easier.

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Case Buyers Guide

These enclosures lend new meaning to the phrase “boom box”

By David Murphy

When we review a case, we take the time to build out a complete system: installing everything from the motherboard to the videocard and power supply. In our view, that’s the only valid means of assessing an enclosure’s merits and shortcomings.

Manufacturers invest big bucks designing the exteriors of their products, adding lights, motorized doors, and other (sometimes goofy) features in an effort to make their box stand apart on crowded store shelves. But you’ll curse every ounce of that bling while you’re building and every time you go back to tweak, upgrade, or plug in a component if they didn’t dedicate just as much attention to crucial details such as drive bays and mounts, the power-supply rack, air flow, front-panel connections (for eSATA, USB, Firewire, and audio), accommodations for air and liquid cooling, and other bread-and-butter features.

That’s not to say that an excellent case should be ugly; after all, it’s your rig’s most visible attribute. Indeed, the cases that earn Maximum PC’s coveted KickAss award are enclosures that manage to strike that delicate balance between form and function, beauty and utility, elegance and ruggedness.

Gigabyte Poseidon 310

Raise a trident in honor of this chassis

Instead of a god of the sea, Gigabyte’s midtower Poseidon 310 chassis is a petite prince. But that’s merely a reflection of this case’s size, not its prowess. It weighs in at 7.75”x17”x20”—small enough to fit into that nook in your desk or the space under your bed.

Even given its small size, the Poseidon supports up to five 5.25-inch devices. We’re unsure why this case—or any case, for that matter—still bothers with multiple external 3.5-inch bays. You get two helpings of them on the Poseidon. We would have rather sacrificed these and an additional 5.25-inch bay in favor of more internal hard drive space.

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CoolerMaster HAF

This is the new case to beat for air-cooling aficionados

Cooler Master’s newest HAF (High Air Flow) chassis is the company’s magnum opus, successfully unifying the best elements from various previous efforts. Event better, the HAF features a number of new features that raise the bar for case design. 

Case cooling is the HAF’s centerpiece. Three 23cm fans at the top, front, and side of the HAF circulate air even when running at just 700rpm, balancing air flow with acceptable noise levels.

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Silverstone Kublai KL03

No stately pleasure dome this

The Kublai KL03 offers a hodgepodge of features that Silverstone never manages to get just right.

Take the  giant horizontal retention bar, for example. It supports two 12cm fans (which aren’t included) and comes with a number of sliding bars for holding your PCI-based components in place. But the retention bar, which must be screwed down to stay in place, did little to support our test rig’s guts.

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In Win B2

Tower, this is Ghost Rider requesting a fly-by

In Win can’t resist building gimmicks into its chassis. The company’s B2 isn’t quite as ostentatious—unless you think the motorized front panel is over the top.

This midtower chassis does, however, take its B2 theme to extreme levels. The vent on the case’s snap-locking side panel looks like a Stealth bomber and the case’s exterior is peppered with aeronautical jargon. We love the look, but working in this case is a different story.

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Koolance PC4-1025BK

Awesome cooling isn’t enough to make this case awesome

Koolance’s PC4-1025BK seems like a perfect power-user box, until you realize that this water-cooling-enriched case is just too small for enthusiast hardware.

A water-cooling mechanism is integrated into the chassis: Koolance’s KIT-1000KB cooler, a tri-fan setup that comes with a front-mounted controller for the fans’ speeds. The whole getup is a tidy little package that cools monstrously even when using the quietest mode the PC4-1025BK offers.

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