Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus
I have been building another computer for a few months now that will be my transcoding machine. Here’s the latest addition. Newegg had this fan on sale and it has many great reviews. I was curious and figured it wouldn’t hurt to try it. Besides, I’m only running the stock heatsink (i5-2500K) and it does its job. I’m sure it’ll be better than what I have now. The installation was straight forward. My tower has access to the motherboard from the bottom side (motherboard) so it made installing the bracket easy. It comes with a 120mm fan. The heatsink can use another but you have to buy it. So I bought another. Once the heatsink is in place, it does move a little. I’m not sure if I installed it right but it seems secure enough. Here are some pics of the heatsink and one fan.
I used this spray to remove the thermal grease from the old heatsink and the top of the CPU. It works well, just be safe with it because it is toxic.
This is the old stock heatsink that comes with the Intel i5-2500K. Again, it does its job well but I was curious to try a different one. I measured the height just to give you an idea of the difference between the new and old heatsink and hope to show an estimate of how much clearance you’ll need in your tower.
Here are some pics to show you the physical difference between the two heatsink.
Make sure you have plenty of room in your tower. I have an Antec Three Hundred tower. It fits just right. I’m also using a Gigabyte GA-Z68MA-D2H-B3 motherboard. This is a micro ATX motherboard so it’s fairly small. The placement of the ram is very close the the Hyper 212 heatsink. There’s room, but not much.
The temps using the stock i5-2500K heatsink fan.
The temps using the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus.
Temps with some load on the CPU. I get about 44* C on 96% CPU load with the Hyper 212 heatsink and two 120mm fans. The CPU is stock and not overclocked. Not too bad I think. It’s not as cooled as water coolers but I’m going simple for now and trying to get a better video card for this system that way I can use more CUDA cores than the 8400GS I’m using right now.
