The Legend RETURNS! Cooler Master Hyper 212 Black Edition

This is the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Black Edition CPU cooler. It now comes in this awesome gunmetal matte black finish that looks absolutely gorgeous with the brushed aluminum texture on the front and I just love the way how it looks. I mean I love anything my black, if it’s a phone or you know, coffee Mug or heck even my car actually I had to manually wrap that.

But anyways, coming back to the point, we’ve seen an exponential growth in terms of computer components receiving the RGB treatment and of course aggressive design elements that might be appealing to some of you out there, but it’s always refreshing to see companies go back to the drawing board and perfect some of their very popular components from, 5 or 10 years ago to make them even better. That’s exactly what defines the Hyper 212 Black Edition. The best part is that this thing only costs $35.

I was actually wondering what kind of performance can you expect when you decide to upgrade to a cooler of this caliber from your traditional stock cooler that comes out of the box with your CPU. So that’s exactly what we’re going to find out. Most of you should be familiar with the way this cooler functions. It’s still a basic design that still happens to be one of the best for the price you pay.

Design

So you get to four heat pipes on each side. Connected to the cold plate installation also was pretty straightforward.

Cooler Master does include brackets for both AMD and Intel. Unfortunately, this won’t work on TR4. They now also include this 120mm Silencio fan that’s supposedly really quite during idle and load operations. Plus they simply attach to the heat sink via these metal clips.

You can also add another 120mm fan at the back if you wish to go for a push pull configuration and I appreciate Cooler Master including an extra set of clips for that.

Test System

Now for testing purposes, I’ll be using this $1,000 AMD based system that I built a while ago and I’ve been using this to test the latest Adrenaline 2019 edition drivers to see what their new features are like and it’s been great so far, but it has been rocking the rate aspire cooler that came out of the Stock CPU. I thought it would be a great case scenario to see what kind of temperatures we can expect when we decide to upgrade to this badboy.

The specs in the system includes a Ryzen 5 2600x with 16 gigabytes of Corsair LPX Memory. I’ve also got an XFX RX 590 Fatboy graphics card all sitting on an MSI b450 Tomahawk motherboard andthe case of choice is the Phanteks P300.

I will be running all of these tests with the side panels closed so we get a more realistic use case scenario when you have the PC right beside you. I know a lot of you guys may be wondering why I decided to go with a 2600X versus a 2600 and the simple answer to that is that the 2600X has a 95 watt TDP rating compared to the 65 watt TDP rating on the 2600 so it actually pushes the limits on these coolers when it comes to performance.

Results

I ran Prime95 for 15 minutes to stress test the CPU both at stock and overclock settings. Now the 2600X at stock settings with the Wraith Spire cooler yeilded around 37 degrees Celsius idle and 92 degrees Celsius under full load with the fan speed set to its default setting.

I did manage to increase the fan rpm all the way up to 2,800 which did result in lower temps, but the acoustic performance was not that great.

Now switching over to the Hyper 212 Black Edition and I saw temps around 33 degrees Celsius and under load it only got as far as 62 degrees Celsius with fan speed set to 1,400 rpm and the best part was the acoustic performance was phenomenal.

So right off the bat you can certainly tell that there’s a significant decrease in temperatures when you decide to upgrade from the stock cooler to an after market solution like the Hyper 212 Black Edition.

I also did some overclocking to see how this cooler can handle it and I used the Ryzen master software to overclock the 2600X to 4.15 gigahertz at 1.25 volts but the sad news is that I was not able to get a stable overclock with the stock cooler installed. Every time after I run Prime95 for around six minutes, the system just crashed and just wasn’t able to keep up. I even tried increasing the fan speed to well over 2,000 rpm and again, the system just crashed because the stock cooler is just so tiny so I can only do so much and it just wasn’t able to handle the overclock.

The Hyper 212 Black Edition on the other hand did pretty well. So we’re talking around 37 degrees Celsius idle and 90 degrees Celsius under load which is still hot, but remember the fan speed was set to about 1,400 rpm.

Bumping that up to 2000 dead bring down the temperature significantly and the acoustic performance was also very respectable.

Verdict

I think it’s safe to say that upgrading from your stock cooler to something a little bit more robust can certainly help bring down those temperatures. I mean, even with the fan speed set to its Max setting, I was barely able to hear the system, which was awesome. There are however, some other factors to consider.

First and foremost, the case of choice. The P300 is certainly not the best case when it comes to airflow as it certainly has some restrictions so if you were to switch that out for a case that has better front intakes, that would have certainly helped decrease the CPU temperatures on both the stock and this cooler as well.

Another important thing to consider is even at load at the stock with the CPU, the clock speeds weren’t hitting above 4Ghz, at least during my test. So certainly overclocking a CPU can help bring up those clock speeds at a consistent rate which is important, especially if you plan on doing some rendering work that could potentially help take advantage of those higher clock frequencies.

So a lot of factors to consider, especially when you’re planning on building your system within a certain budget. And again, for $35 this cooler surprised me in a lot of ways.