CPU COOLER: Cooler Master Hyper N212

-$30

Purchasing a CPU cooler is another area that it is never wise to “save” money by going stock or cheap. What is extraordinary, is that Cooler Master has raised the bar for cooling performance while also lowering the price at the same time! Your CPU cooler, if picked properly, will not only reward you by allowing you to more safely overclock your CPU past many higher-clocked models priced way above it, you will likely use it for several CPU upgrades and perhaps for many cool-running years. This is another innovative new universal CPU cooler from Cooler Master and Karan also had real difficulty convincing me that it was only $30.

Hyper N212’s quality is evident and its performance is outstanding partly due to it’s excellence balance of quiet, cool and budget! The rest of the reason Hyper N212 works so well is largely due to the design where the four copper heatpipes come into direct contact with the CPU, as pictured below:

Cooler Master Hyper N212 - This is a $30 investment!

As an warning to not be cheap when chosing your CPU cooler, I used the stock AMD cooler to get my Phenom II 550 to over 3.7 GHz – up +600 MHz over stock 3.1 GHz frequencies. But I would not keep it there 24/7 as the temperatures started to rise dangerously after 3.6 GHz, and 50s C – although certainly not “dangerous” in the short term – certainly is not an optimum temperature for any long running reliable overclock.

That same 50s C dropped to mid-35s C with the CoolerMaster Hyper N212 with its included stock single fan – and we were able to overclock to almost 3.9 GHz!

What was impressive was that temperatures with the much more expensive Thermalright/Scythe 120 MM HS/fan combination were nearly identical to those achieved with the Hyper N212. As a bonus, my Phenom II 550 X2 now gained another +200 MHz over using the stock cooler and my CPU core was now also over 20C cooler! With Hyper N212, I was able to achieve the highest overclock possible with the amount of extra voltage that was applied to the core.

Of course, this is just one example of a dual core CPU’s heat tamed by a high-quality cooler. We will also explore Hyper N212’s ability to cool a tri core and perhaps even a quad. The universal design of Hyper N 212 makes it a very decent choice for cooling any CPU and there are only a couple of caveats that we will cover in that part of our value series. There is no doubt that Cooler Master wins a “value” award for this inexpensive yet effective CPU cooler.

We also want to let you know that we found a very ghetto – but effective use – for super glue in attaching a fan to a cooler very quickly when the clips are hard to attach! There are also a tool that makes gluing completely unnecessary and one that we will also share with you to perhaps save you time and frustration on your next PC build.

The Video Cards, Overclocking and Benching

As we mentioned earlier, we will be testing our PC with GTX 280 and HD 4870-X2 and using 16 benchmarks – 2 synthetic FutureMark tests and 14 games. We have added a new game, ARMA2‘s official benchmark, and it is a beast for PCs to run on maxed out settings. We are testing our videocards with Cat 9-6 and GeForce 186.18 so that you may directly compare benches with HD 4870-X2 and GTX 280 that were run on our Intel PC with the driver set before it – Catalyst 9-5 and GeForce 185.85 – in our last review.

Of course, we are going to compare the stock clocks of our 4 CPUs. However, we feel that it is very important for us to find the maximum overclock for each AMD CPU so as to compare overclocked performance with our Q9550S at 4.0 GHz. Naturally, these overclocks may be higher or lower than what you will get, but it should give you an idea of the relative gaming performance of these CPUs, and perhaps something to aim for.

After we overclock, we will explore further tweaking of CPU in the BIOS to achieve even more performance than what we could get by a simple FSB (HTT) increase. We will also see how increasing the voltage raises the temperatures and we will explore the limits of each overclocked CPU core. We will also take a look at AMD’s “all-in-one” benching utility, Overdrive.

Finally, we will have the results of our extensive testing of AMD’s Athlon II 250 X2 vs. Phenom II 550 X2 and 720 X3 shortly; and we will chart their performance right next to Intel’s more expensive Penryn PC and Q9550s with 16 gaming benchmarks at 1920×1200 and 1680×1050. Stay tuned. There is a lot coming in our value series and we think you will be pleasantly surprised. We certainly were.

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