Picking an appropriate cooler for your CPU is no joke and is big business for the companies involved in making sure today’s CPUs can perform to the top of their abilities. With recent advances in CPU design they have been running faster and quite a bit cooler than the CPUs of last year but nevertheless they can still hit temperatures will above 140 degrees if not properly cooled. While that may not damage today’s CPUs, it does contribute additional, unnecessary heat inside your PCs enclosure and that’s not ideal for the surrounding hardware.

Another thing that has helped CPU coolers become more effective is the manufacturer’s use of more advanced materials and methods. For example, a great deal of copper and aluminum are used more as well as the inclusion of heat-pipes on some of them. Heat pipes contain actual liquid that rises to cool after it heats then falls back down after cooling – that process allows some of today’s coolers run completely silent.

In this article we’re looking at a few different solutions from Thermaltake, Cooler Master and Zalman. For the uninformed, all three of these companies are at the top of the game in the world of producing quality cooling solutions.

Hyper 6+
This unit from Cooler Master sports a universal mounting system which means you can use it for just about any CPU made within the past few years. It has a large fan that augments its heat-pipe cooling. The end result is one that cools extremely well, runs very quietly and adapts to just about any CPU you can throw at it.

 

There’s a large copper section that directly covers the CPU while the rest of the unit is high-grade aluminum. This means that what you have is a combination of a core that does a tremendous job of drawing the heat from the chip while the aluminum has a fast dissipation rate.

There are a few caveats, however, as its sheer size may make it impossible to use in cramped scenarios and the fact that its mounting system is a bit awkward means that every time you do a CPU swap you’ll end up pulling the motherboard as well. It requires the use of a back plate behind the motherboard where the included nuts tighten down on the threaded mounting pegs. While this method does mean you have a very secure cooler it’s a pain in the back-side to pull a motherboard whenever you want to swap a CPU.

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