We can’t have a CPU cooler group without at least one entry from Cooler Master, and in this case it’s the Hyper 612 V2. This is obviously a remake of the original 612 cooler, which sadly we can’t comment on or compare it to, because we’ve never used it.
Regardless, the Cooler Master Hyper 612 V2 is a large, rectangular aluminium fin heatsink block, with a single 120mm fan attached to one side. It measures 139 x 102 x 160mm and weighs a reasonable 880g.
There are six 6mm heatpipes running from the CPU contact plate and threading their way up through the folding fin design of the heatsink. The heatpipes utilise the Cooler Master CDC (Continuous Direct Contact) technology that bunches the pipes together at the CPU contact plate with no gaps to ensure a perfectly smooth surface for maximum contact and heat conduction. It’s interesting actually, because the heatpipes are on the CPU contact plate, so there is, in theory, no loss of heat conduction through another layer of copper. Whether this is a more effective design remains to be seen, but on paper it looks pretty impressive.
In addition to the direct contact of the pipes, where they exit via the top of the heatsink there’s a small ‘X’ shaped vent next to each pipe. This X-Vent technology is to help airflow by creating vortices to improve the cooling and guide air over the heatpipes. Again, this remains to be proved in our tests, but it’s a unique design and one we’re quite interested in testing.
The 120mm quiet fan can be clipped into place on one side of the heatsink and spins at speeds of 800 through to 1300rpm depending on the PWM option on the motherboard. With the fan and heatsink technology combined, the idle temperature of our overclocked 4.4GHz i7-4790k came to 28ºC. The stress tests reached a high of 79.5ºC, which nearly triggered the 80ºC alarm we had set on the motherboard. Incidentally, noise levels were measures at 45dbA.
The temperatures measured were quite surprising, since we got all excited over the technology we were reading about before fitting the cooler to the motherboard. Speaking of which, the Hyper 612 V2 was quite easy to install. The size of the heatsink did cause a bit of a nuisance when trying to screw the cooler down in place, and the distance between the last RAM stick and the front of the fan was mere millimetres. Still, it was in place okay and done reasonably quickly.
The cooler kit contains everything you’ll need for both Intel and AMD sockets, and there’s a small amount of thermal paste in the packaging as well. One note on the paste: the stuff we had was very runny, and it was lucky we squeezed it on while the motherboard was in a horizontal position, as it would have quickly run off and over the surrounding components.
We were expecting better from Cooler Master, to be honest. The Hyper 612 V2 is an okay cooler, but we weren’t all that impressed with the numbers from our tests.
Intel LGA 2011-3/2011/1366/1156/1155/1150/775
AMD FM2+/FM2/FM1/AM3+/AM3/AM2+/AM2