We haven't used a Cryorig air cooler before, so we were looking forward to putting the H5 Universal through its paces.
It features the usual rectangular heatsink design, but Cryorig has added something a little different to the mix, in that the H-Series of coolers incorporates a Hive Fin design structure. This means that rather than the standard horizontal fins of the heatsink as we normally see, the H5 has a honeycomb effect through its 38 aluminium fins. This is supposed to exhaust hot air faster and more efficiently than conventional methods.
Added to this are four 6mm pure copper nickel-plated heatpipes that carry the heat up from the CPU contact plate and through the intricate honeycomb heatsink, to emerge in the large surface on top for extra cooling properties. There’s also a decent 140mm PWM fan with spin speeds of 700 through to 1300rpm. Incidentally, the fan has rubberised acoustic mounts to help cut down on vibration and noise levels.
The entire cooler measures 98 x 143 x 160mm and weighs around 850g. It’s extremely easy to fit, taking just ten minutes and comes with mounting plates and fittings for both AMD and Intel sockets – hence the Universal part of the title. It’s also quite slim and raised enough off the CPU socket to allow plenty of room for any make of RAM stick. There’s also room for the surrounding components as well.
Once fitted to our test machine, the idle temperature of the overclocked 4.4GHz i7-4790K was a decent 30ºC. Under load, the temperature measured was 66ºC – just one degree higher than the Be Quiet cooler. One aspect, though, where the Cryorig H5 Universal did come top of the leaderboard was in the noise
levels, with a whisper quiet 39dbA.
There’s a lot to like about the Cryorig H5 Universal. It proves itself against a dual fan cooler more than well enough, the clearance is really good, it’s easy to fit, and it’s the quietest cooler we’ve tested so far. But there’s one more thing we really like about this cooler. The Cryorig website has an origami print and cut out template that you can download for the socket of your choice. All you need to do is print out the PDF, and once you’ve cut along the marks and folded it into shape, you can dry-test the size of the cooler on your own board before committing to buying it.
And if you are interesting in making a purchase, the average price is roughly £39.99, which makes this one of the cheapest coolers here and one of the best we’ve had the pleasure of testing in a long time.
Intel LGA 2011-3/2011/1366/1156/1155/1150/775
AMD FM2+/FM2/FM1/AM3+/AM3/AM2+/AM2