Okay, back on track, objective writing mode on; the review. Today's PC's are hot in many ways and they need sufficient cooling. Providing sufficient cooling really is not an issue, yet keeping the noise levels down; that's a real challenge.

Personally I hate, seriously hate, the noise levels PCs make these days. In my work environment, all PC's have been passively water-cooled, with passively cooled mainboards. So yes, the only thing I hear coming from these PCs is the noise of the PSU fan and the HDs. And that already is too loud in my opinion. Come on SSD, I want it !

Silent cooling techniques; today we'll chat about the newest cooler from CoolerMaster, available everywhere pretty dang soon. The product is called the Hiper 212.

The technology behind it all

Let's have a look at the technique used. Believe it or not, but the technology of heatpipe cooling is somewhat based on a 'refrigerator'. In all honesty, this is a combination of the technology used in refrigeration and actually phase changer coolers. When you look closely at the cooler you'll see copper pipes and cooling ribbons.

An internal gas/ substance or even air is inside these pipes and flows from the chamber upwards towards the cooling ribbons, where heat will be dissipated with the help of airflow. The cooling method is all based around circulation.

By absorbing heat from the processor, the heat will travel towards the top of the pipes where heat will follow the path of least resistance, to the aluminum fins. Once the gas is cooled down again it'll return into a solid fluid form and travel back to the bottom of the CPU cooler. The recirculation of the coolant is based on gravity.

So the cooling block mounted on your CPU absorbs whatever heat energy is available to it from its surroundings.

The Cooler

Hiper 212. It's large and unusual to look at, and as explained based on heatpipe technology. The advantages I have already explained to you; good cooling versus not too much noise. What we'll do is simple: First we'll have a look at the cooler with the help of some photos and then we'll test the cooler on an Intel mainboard with a Core 2 Duo E6600 processor. We'll then check idle and load temperatures of the processor.

Some Hiper insights: the cooler offers a dual-fin design (two separate cooling fin segments), LED fan, comes with universal fitting for both AMD and INTEL CPU's and offers reasonably silent operation. Supported CPU's by the way are Intel and AMD CPUs, including Intel Core 2 Quad, Core 2 Extreme, Core 2 Duo and AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core, and AMD Athlon 64 FX.

Dual-fin heatsink. It's a bit of marketing here but basically what Coolermaster is trying to tell you is that the Hyper 212 uses a dual-fin heat sink design, leaving space in the middle for the overkill airflow to pass through without the usual resistance of traditional heat sinks; therefore pushing hot airflow out of the chassis at an even faster rate *phew did I make any sense there ?*

When we look a little closer we notice the mirror-coated copper base with no less than four heat pipes connected.

As usual guided with photos to show you the product and installation processes.