Budget priced heatsinks can be a great value, or a complete bust for regular PC users.  In some cases it makes almost no sense, like a budget Core i7 cooler.  The price tag attached to the Core i7s price it well beyond most people’s views of budget and even if they scrimped and saved to pick one up, they are likely to use the stock cooler.  We at PC Perspective are a little strange and feel the i7 920 is an incredible value, but not in a way that encourages the use of anything but the most powerful of heatsinks. 

What does seem to make sense is a budget cooler for the Core i7’s unreleased little brother, the i5.  These chips will be a less powerful version of the Core i7, with only dual channel memory and no QPI and will likely be both cheaper and cooler than the current i7s.  Enter the Cooler Master Hyper TX3, which will set you back all of $20 and will work on LGA 775/1156 and AMD Sockets 754/939/940/AM2/AM3.  If you like the sound of this cooler so far, you should head to the Guru of 3D to see how it performs.


“We test the new CoolerMaster Hyper TX3 CPU cooler. Though the cooler will not be high-end performance wise, it can still manage the latest Core 2 Duo and Quad processors really well, and sure, overclocked as well. This new TX3 also supports the upcoming Core i5 processors from Intel based on Socket LGA 1156.

Typically this would not be a massively interesting release of course, however… with a sales price of only 14.95 EUR/USD let’s face it… the dynamic certainly changes for the better.”

Here are some more Cases & Cooling reviews from around the web:

Click Here to go to 

Cases & Cooling  CASES & COOLING