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Scythe Mugen 2

Nathan Edwards — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:30:24 -0600

Bulky, but it gets the job done

They just keep getting bigger and bigger. Now that CPU air-cooling manufacturers have seemingly settled on the skyscraper school of heatsink design, there seems to be a competition over who can cram the most cooling fins into the largest area. Scythe’s Mugen 2 air cooler, the follow-up to its popular Mugen series, is one of the largest coolers of this type that we’ve ever tested. But can it match the cooling power of its slightly smaller cousins, such as Thermalright’s U-120 eXtreme?

The Mugen 2 is a hefty hunk of a cooler, at 5.1 inches wide, 5 inches deep (with the included 12cm fan), and 6.2 inches high; it weighs nearly two pounds. It’s not the heaviest cooler we’ve ever tested, nor the most unwieldy, but its girth could certainly prevent you from installing it in all orientations on all motherboards. We had trouble fitting it in some orientations on our EVGA 680i SLI board—our usual preference being to install the cooler fan parallel with the rear exhaust fan. On our board, though, there wasn’t room; we resorted to attaching the cooler fan perpendicular to the rear exhaust fan. Thankfully, this didn’t seem to impact performance, as the Mugen 2 performed slightly better in our tests than the Thermalright U120-eXtreme—about 2.25 C cooler at both idle and full CPU burn.

The Mugen 2 pushes the upper limit on air-cooler size, but we'll allow it. This time.

The Mugen 2 ships with mounting brackets for LGA1366, 775, and AMD boards; the first two use the same bracket and backplate but different screw holes. Support for the new LGA1156 socket wasn’t available at the time of this review, but the company states it is in the works. Installation requires motherboard removal or a motherboard tray with a backplane cutout. Each of its five copper heat pipes rises into its own separate stack of cooling fins, allowing airflow between the stacks.

If you opt to use the included 12cm fan, you might have to tweak your motherboard fan control settings due to its four-pin PWM connector. We manually set the fan control to 100 percent for testing, after the motherboard’s fan control resulted in significantly higher temperatures.

You can attach up to four 12cm fans to the Mugen 2—one to each face of the fin array—using the familiar thin wire clips found on similar coolers. Whether this actually helps, of course, is up for debate. We didn’t see any performance gains when we experimented with multiple fans on the Noctua NH-U12P and Thermalright U-120 eXtreme.

For laudable performance, a relatively easy install compared to its peers, and a lower price point, we’re awarding the Scythe Mugen 2 our Kick Ass Award. However, this is clearly the upper limit of how big a cooler can be and still earn a high recommendation. Hear that, vendors? Scale ‘em down a bit.

Thermaltake ISGC-300

Nathan Edwards — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:30:00 -0500

Kind to the ears, deadly to heat

Everyone and their CPU-cooler-manufacturing mother are jumping aboard the skyscraper-formfactor bandwagon, hoping to match the performance of Thermalright’s Ultra-120 eXtreme and Noctua’s NH-U12P air coolers. Last month we tested Zalman’s attempt, and this month we have Thermaltake’s answer, the ISGC-300, one of a series of four ISGC-branded air coolers recently released into the wild. Thermaltake’s creative relationship with the English language is responsible for the ISGC moniker, which stands for “Inspiration of Silent Gaming Cooling.”

The ISGC-300 consists of a copper heat exchanger with four heat pipes running into a tower of 33 saw-toothed fins. At 6.24 inches high by five inches wide by 2.8 inches deep, it’s slightly shorter and narrower than Thermalright’s Ultra-120, but about a quarter-inch deeper. A 12cm white Thermaltake hydrodynamic-bearing fan is held onto the front using metal clips in a manner reminiscent of the Noctua NH-U12P. The nine-bladed fan is quiet and includes a variable-speed switch in lieu of a four-pin PVM connector. At its quietest, it’s nearly silent; at its loudest, it’s still damned quiet.

The now-familiar formfactor of Thermaltake's ISGC-300 brings the cooling prowess we've come to expect.

Unlike most of the coolers we’ve reviewed recently, with their backplates, finicky spring screws, and wobbly mounting brackets, the ISGC is pretty painless to install. You screw the mounting brackets onto the bottom of the cooler, then secure them to the motherboard with nuts and washers—no backplate or long-handled screwdriver required, although if your motherboard tray doesn’t have a cutout for the CPU, you’ll have to remove your motherboard for the install. The lack of a backplate, which provides stability, could be an issue if you plan to ship the box a long distance. But frankly, we’ve had no problems with far larger heatsinks that lack backplates. Like most coolers of this style and size, you may have to mount the heatsink so it’s parallel with your RAM, as mounting the other way may bump into RAM cooling fins.

At its highest fan speed, the ISGC cool to within a few degrees of our champion air cooler, Thermalright’s U120-eXtreme. The ISGC-300 cooled an idling CPU to within a half-degree Celsius of the Thermalright, and at full burn the ISGC’s temps were less than two degrees Celsius higher than the Thermalright’s. Thermaltake has taken a step in the right direction with the ISGC-300, with its relatively easy install, competitive price, near-silent operation, and performance that comes close to the category leader.

Zalman CNPS 10X Extreme

Nathan Edwards — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:00:35 -0500

The radial-copper-finned stalwart tries something new

The Zalman CNPS line (especially the long-lived 9000 series) is known for its distinctive copper-finned air coolers, which are nearly always organized in a circular pattern around the fan. This arrangement worked well for a long time, with the CNPS9700 and 9900 garnering rave reviews in these pages. But all the top-performing coolers we’ve tested recently (July’s Thermalright U120-eXtreme and August’s Noctua U12P) have had one thing in common: a skyscraper formfactor, whereby a tall stack of closely packed cooling fins jut upward, with one or more 12cm fans strapped to the side. Now, Zalman is getting in on the game with its latest CNPS cooler, the 10X Extreme, which takes the skyscraper-and-12cm-fan design and adds variable-speed fan control.

The Zalman CNPS 10X Extreme sports five heat pipes running through a closely packed array of black nickel-plated fins. It’s a great look, and proves that Zalman doesn’t just do copper well. The fan remote can be slotted into the plastic cowl at the top of the heatsink or, more usefully, be routed to the outside of your case with the included extension wire. The fan has three auto-speed settings: low (up to 1,500rpm), mid (up to 1,950rpm) and high (up to 2,150rpm), and one manual dial, for fine-tuning between 1,000rpm and 2,150rpm.

Like similar coolers, in order to mount the heatsink to your motherboard, you have to remove the cooler’s fan. But unlike the Thermalright and the Noctua, which use clips, the Zalman’s fan is screwed on, making installation difficult. Worse, the fan’s (very short) four-pin connector is routed behind the fan inside the cowl, which makes it very painful to install. Aside from the fan issue, mounting the Zalman on a Socket 775 motherboard is easier than installing most of its peers. There’s no backplate, and the mounting bracket attaches with a pin mechanism that is quite sturdy. The retention mechanism is the same as on Zalman’s previous coolers and attaches with four spring screws.

The Zalman CNPS10X is even bigger than its similarly shaped peers.

Unfortunately, though the Zalman 10X’s form matches that of the category’s top coolers, its performance does not. In our tests, the Zalman (at maximum fan speed) couldn’t match our current champion, the Thermalright U120, with one fan. Idle temperatures from the Zalman were within two degrees Celsius of the U120, but temperatures at full CPU burn were four degrees C higher than with the Thermalright cooler.

The 10X is even bigger than its peers, too: At 5.3 inches tall, 4 inches deep, and 6.3 inches wide, it’s slightly larger in every dimension than the Noctua U12P, and it weighs more than two pounds. The 10X comes dangerously close to being too large—some orientations just don’t work because the heat pipes bump capacitors or the northbridge heatsinks. Both the Noctua and Thermalright coolers can mount additional fans—the Zalman doesn’t have that option, nor (because of its fan-connector placement) can you easily replace the included fan with a higher-performing one, as many air-cooling users prefer.

We appreciate Zalman’s efforts to hit a higher performance mark with its products, and we like the CNPS 10X’s looks and fan control. Zalman also gets points for including mounting brackets for Core i7, Core i5, and AMD motherboards. But the performance isn’t quite at the level of our slightly smaller, more-customizable champions, and the price is higher.

And we really wish manufacturers would stop calling their coolers “Extreme.”

Corsair Cooling Hydro Series H50 CPU Cooler

Nathan Edwards — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 14:30:13 -0500

Corsair continues its trend of offering excellent products at decent prices

Corsair is best known for its memory and power supplies, but recently the company has taken to rebadging excellent OEM products for retail. First came a rebadged edition of Samsung’s blazing-fast 256GB MLC solid state drive. Now Corsair is continuing the trend by scooping up Asetek’s all-in-one liquid CPU cooler and rebranding it as the Corsair Cooling Hydro Series H50. It’s not just a straight-up rebadge. According to Corsair, it worked with Asetek to modify the latter’s OEM-only version, adopting a universal design and reportedly improving performance. We can’t verify how Corsair’s H50 compares to the OEM version, as the OEM version isn’t available for consumer purchase.

We were more interested to see how the H50 did against CoolIt’s similarly priced Domino (reviewed June 2009). Like the Domino, the Corsair H50 consists of a CPU heat exchanger/pump unit that fits atop the CPU and is connected to a radiator, which mounts in place of your case’s rear 12cm fan. The H50 includes its own 12cm fan, which sits between the radiator and the case wall and pulls air through the radiator fins. The pump uses a three-pin power lead, which needs to plug into the CPU fan power port on the motherboard, and the 12cm fan, confusingly, has a four-pin connector, which plugs into any other fan control port. We originally tried running the pump off a direct-power Molex and the fan off the CPU PWM port, but saw miserable performance. Only after reversing the two did we achieve the expected performance.

The Corsair H50 is quiet, classy, maintenance-free, and gets the job done.

The heat exchanger mounts to the mother-board using a backplate/clamp mechanism, which is held on by spring screws. It’s not the easiest install we’ve ever undertaken, and the fact that the pump is permanently attached to the radiator means you’ll be dealing with that bit of inconvenience during the whole process, but it’s not terribly arduous, either.

Once installed, the H50 performed admirably. Unlike the CoolIt Domino, there’s no rpm monitor or adjustable-speed fans (unless you control yours from the motherboard), but the H50 performs extremely well (and quietly) on its single setting. The H50 lowered full-burn temperatures nearly 35 degrees from the stock cooler, and almost five degrees below the Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme, our champion air cooler (reviewed July 2009). Idle temps were barely two degrees higher than with the Thermalright, but still nearly 15 degrees cooler than stock.

The Corsair H50 retails for $80—comparable to the CoolIt and most of our favorite air coolers. It’s quiet, classy, and works like a charm.

Noctua NH-U12P

Nathan Edwards — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 13:30:58 -0500

Cool and quietly competent

At first glance, the Noctua NH-U12P is nearly identical to another tower-of-power CPU cooler: Thermalright’s Ultra-120 eXtreme (reviewed July 09). Like that cooler, the NH-U12P consists of a copper heat exchanger and four dual-heat pipes, topped with a tall stack of aluminum cooling fins with a front-mounted fan. At 6.2 inches high, 5 inches wide, and 2.8 inches deep, the NH-U12P is nearly the same height as the Thermalright, not quite as wide, but quite a bit deeper.

Noctua ships its cooler with a top-of-the-line brown-and-beige NH-P12 fan with nine slightly beveled blades, which is held onto the cooling fin stack by a set of rather flimsy wire clips. The fan itself comes with three 3-pin power options: regular, low-noise, and ultra-low noise, which set the fan to spin at 1,300rpm, 1,100rpm, and 900rpm, respectively. The fan is impressively quiet even at top speed.

The Noctua NH-U12P is one of the best coolers we've ever tested, and quite quiet at that.

We like Noctua’s SecuFirm mounting system—two mounting brackets screw into a backplate and the cooler is fastened to the brackets via a pair of spring screws. This makes installation considerably easier than on similar models, in which the whole cooler must be mounted directly to the backplate, although the position of the mounting screws means fans must be attached after the cooler is mounted.

In our tests, we found that the NH-U12P, paired (as shipped) with a single NH-P12, performed to within a few degrees of the Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme at both idle and full burn. Noctua shipped ours with an extra $20 NH-P12 to clip to the other side of the heatsink, but we saw no reduction in temperatures when we used two fans instead of one.

A few gripes: The wire clips that attach the fan to the heat dissipaters are flimsy and difficult to attach, especially with the cooler already mounted to the motherboard. And the cooler just plain takes up a lot of room. But for all that, it offers powerful, quiet cooling with performance and price nearly identical to our champion Thermaltake U-120 eXtreme, with an easier install process to boot.

Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme-775 RT

Nathan Edwards — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 14:30:15 -0500

Big, heavy, simple, and powerful

The last Thermalright cooler we reviewed, the IFX-14 (November 2008), actually bested our then-champion Thermaltake DuOrb in performance, but its enormous size cost it the crown. The slimmer Ultra-120 eXtreme, while still a skyscraper of finny goodness, is much skinnier than the IFX-14, and (happily) includes one 12cm clip-on fan—the older model supported two fans, but included none.

Five nickel-plated copper heat pipes rise from opposite sides of the base through a large stack of heat-dissipating fins, cooled by a 12cm fluid-dynamic bearing fan. The included fan connects to the motherboard fan socket with a 3-pin connector, so there’s no onboard fan-speed control.

It's not the lightest nor newest air cooler out there, but it's quiet and brutally effective.

The Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme rises 6.3 inches from the CPU socket and looks like nothing more than a large apartment building, at two inches deep and 5.2 inches wide (not including the fan). At two and a half pounds, it’s as heavy as the Cooler Master V10 (reviewed in April 2009), but not nearly as cumbersome, and unlike the V10 its bulk is directed upwards—it doesn’t overhang the RAM or stand in the way of crucial components.

Installation of the Ultra-120 on an LGA 775 or 1366 socket motherboard is trickier than we’d like—even if your case has a removable motherboard tray with a cutout for the backplane, you’ll find the cooler much easier to install if you take the motherboard out first. The folding retainer bracket is a pain in the arse to keep in place, but once you’ve fastened the spring-loaded screws into the backplane, everything becomes much easier.

The good news is that once the cooler is installed and the 12cm fan is clipped to its front, the Ultra-120 easily outperforms our current champion air cooler, the Zalman CNPS 9900. Thermalright’s cooler decreased idle temps by two degrees more than the Zalman, and nearly eight degrees at full burn. For that matter, the Ultra-120 outperformed our stock Intel cooler by a shocking 25 degrees at full burn.

The Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme isn’t the newest air-cooler out there—it came out in early 2007, but we missed it the first time around. Now that we’ve finally put it through its paces, we’re glad we caught it. It’s the new (old?) air cooler to beat.

Thermaltake BigTyp 14 Pro

Nathan Edwards — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:00:00 -0500

It's big, mean, loud, and it doesn't play well with others, but it gets the job done

At five inches high, 6.14 inches square at the top, and weighing a few ounces shy of two pounds, the Thermaltake BigTyp 14 Pro is among the biggest and heaviest coolers we’ve tested—although it’s not as big as Cooler Master’s V10, reviewed last month.

The BigTyp 14 Pro contains six heat pipes routed through aluminum fins mounted perpendicular to the motherboard and is topped with a plastic shroud and 14cm variable-speed fan, which blows hot air straight down instead of through the back of the case, like with most performance coolers. Two retention clips screw into the base and are fastened with nuts on the underside of the motherboard, just like with the Cooler Master V10. Installing the BigTyp 14 Pro is easier than the V10—it’s smaller and lighter, it won’t bump up against crucial components like RAM, and the nuts can be screwed in with a Phillips screwdriver as opposed to a hex wrench. But there’s no room for a 12cm rear fan with the BigTyp installed.

The Thermaltake BigTyp 14 Pro is big enough to cause problems with some cases.

The support brace that reinforces our Cooler Master ATCS 840’s removable motherboard tray and backplate got in the way of the BigTyp’s plastic shroud. We’re not sure who to blame for this: Cooler Master for putting a brace so close to the top left of the motherboard, or Thermaltake for creating such an enormous cooler? Regardless, the cooler should install fine in most other chassis. (We ended up Dremeling out a corner of the cooler’s shroud to make it fit.)

At low fan speeds, the BigTyp 14 Pro outperforms our stock cooler, and at top howling speeds it’s a match for our favorite, the Zalman CNPS 9900. But even at $20 cheaper than the Zalman, the BigTyp won’t be taking the top slot. It’s too big and it messes up internal airflow by requiring removal of the 12cm back fan and routing its hot air straight down onto the mobo instead of onto the back of the case.

Cooler Master V10

Nathan Edwards — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:02:56 -0500

Huge, mediocre, and difficult to install is no way to go through life, son

The Cooler Master V10 is a monster. It weighs two pounds, 10 ounces, stands 6.3x9.3x5.1 inches, and contains one thermoelectric cooler, two fans, and two heatsinks: one on the CPU and one on the TEC. The TEC, which needs to be powered by a 4-pin Molex on a dedicated power lead, activates only when needed.

The Cooler Master V10 is two and a half pounds of frustration.

The V10’s installation is the worst we’ve ever experienced. Two retention clips attach to the cooler, which you then attach to a bracket you mount on the back side of the motherboard. This means removing your motherboard and balancing the cooler on your lap while you screw it in. Unfortunately, the V10 is so huge that it blocks the motherboard’s top three ATX screws, making it difficult to mount the motherboard in even the roomiest cases. And the V10’s bulk made it difficult to connect both the 8-pin and the 24-pin motherboard power cables on our test system’s motherboard—impressive, since they’re on opposite sides of the motherboard.

The V10’s RAM fan means you have to remove the cooler to remount your memory, and DIMMs with cooling vanes, like Corsair’s Dominators, are likely to be bumped by the V10’s overhanging radiator. Indeed, the first few times we tried to install the V10, our machine wouldn’t POST due to RAM seating issues. It wasn’t until we replaced our tall DIMMs with shorter sticks, and removed the optional backplane bracket to mount the cooler (which can warp the motherboard), that we could even get our system to start.

Ultimately, the V10 offers nothing to recommend itself. It’s a nightmare to install in most machines—the only exceptions are cases with motherboard tray cutouts behind the CPU. Plus, its performance is merely mediocre: Our favorite air cooler, the Zalman CNPS9900, outcools it easily in both idle and full burn (by three and five degrees, respectively). The Zalman cooler is also smaller, $60 cheaper, easier to install, and requires less power.