Final words and conclusion
Final words and conclusion
Alright, let's wrap thing up. In its bare essence the V6 GT is a pretty nice looking cooler. Many other reviews actually conclude this cooler to be some seriously hot stuff, praising it into heaven. There are however a number of negatives that somehow other reviewers seem to leave out.
First off, the mounting system is just dreadful. You need a handful of components to mount the cooler making it the most user-unfriendly cooler I have ever seated onto a motherboard. The motherboard will need to come out 100% as you'll be flipping and tossing it around to get the mounting brackets secured. With two hands this is a near impossible job, two persons for installtion are recommended, yep. Seriously, we have seen this more often with Cooler Master cooling mounts, with some models being the worst designs in the business when it comes to an innovative workable mounting solution for the end-user. I really dislike the installation process of this cooler and just wonder why a company who makes excellence in all its ways continuously messes up the cooling mounts.
Then there is noise. The amount of noise the fans create when the CPU starts to heat up is rather high. With the CPU at default and the motherboard automatically regulating FAN RPM we reached roughly 47~48 dBA, and to translate that into understandable terms, that's as loud as a GeForce GTX 480 fully stressed. Now, in idle the fan rotation will go down, but it remains at a noise level that I find somewhat atrocious. My tip: To compensate for the noise levels use a fan controller or set your BIOS at, say, 50% RPM maximum. Only then will the noise levels calm down, at the cost of some performance of course.
Design wise we also have to admit that Cooler Master did some funky stuff with the two fans, V-shaped heatpipe array and the LED on top of the cooler. It would have been nice to see some sort of fan-control function applied to that button/LED combo though, as that is really what I feel to be lacking on this product. I mean, it is competing with the more expensive 10X series from Zalman, which are cheaper, perform roughly equal and are more silent and come with a controller on the top of the line models.
Performance wise we see decent cooling performance. You should not be afraid to overclock your processor, as the V6 GT will keep the temperatures at acceptable levels witha lot of capacity. But here as well, for a two fan cooler I expected a tiny bit more bite out of the design. So overall we feel the V6 GT is a nice cooler with decent performance levels. The design and looks are great but we do feel that the noise levels are rather excessive for a product in this price range, but you can tweak that out by lowering RPM levels manually.
The Cooler Master V6 GT is currently selling for roughly 55 EUR / 65 USD.
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