The Cooler Master Hyper 612 Ver. 2 CPU cooler is a member of their "Hyper Series", upper-mainstream product lineup. It looks to be one of the (if not the) biggest offerings in that category. Its extreme dimensions are 139mm (5.47") in length by 102mm (4.02") wide, with a height of 160.4mm (6.32"). It has a 120mm fan which basically takes up a whole side and slowly blows air across it. Some sites claim that it can be used fanless with some (but not every) CPU.
Cooler Master is particularly proud of their "Continuous Direct Contact" technology. In other words, the heat pipes are flattened into a contact with the CPU's heatspreader (or die guard for people like Morry). This eliminates a reservoir of heat before the copper pipes can carry it to the aluminum fins and out into the air.
The heatsink is now available, but no pricing information yet (I cannot find it online).
I wonder how much of a
I wonder how much of a difference the added fins in the aluminum part of the base actually make. Probably less of a difference than the fact that relative to the direction of air flow, the heat pipes have been rotated 90 degrees compared to those of the Hyper 612S. This means that in a typical Intel system with the heatsink mounted so the heatsink fan exhausts towards the back of the case, the actual CPU die under the IHS is going to be basically sitting beneath only the middle two heatpipes or so. This means the outer-most heatpipes will be entirely reliant on conduction of heat through the IHS and from neighboring heat pipes. Rotate this monster 90 degrees to exhaust towards what would be the top of a typical tower case and I wonder if that could affect its performance since the core will now span most if not all of those heat pipes. Depending on the build, one may not have a choice due to possible clearance issues with GPU, memory, VRM heat sinks, etc.
Also, I think their marketing has been taking some liberties in describing their “Continuous Direct Contact” technology.
Because heat pipes are round and they are essentially being flattened on one side, there is always going to be a small gap/seam between adjacent heat pipes along the mating surface. CoolerMaster has done a good job at minimizing these seams, but they are not “perfectly smooth”. This is clearly visible in the photos of the base. However, I would say that however one chooses to describe them, they are a net benefit to cooling performance.
You bring up an interesting
You bring up an interesting point about rotating the heatsink 90 degrees. I had to think about it for a minute but it makes complete sense.
I’d like to see a thermal image of a bare cpu showing heat distribution over the IHS
Off topic question: I’ve seen a lot of small form factor and server heatsinks with ducting, or closed sides.
Would adding a shroud help cooling performance for tower coolers?
One negative I can think of is the surrounding components would suffer from less air movement.
Speaking of thermal images, I
Speaking of thermal images, I wouldn’t mind seeing an image of the whole cooler while running. I suspect a lot of the size is just for show and does not represent useful cooling performance.
I don’t think a shroud would change the cooling performance much. Almost all of the air moved by the fan is already going to go through the cooling fins.
I think you’d have to test
I think you’d have to test firstly without the fan running to see how well the heat is transferred and if it’s concentrated in areas because of the design. Then with the fan running to see the reduction in temps and how well the effective the fan is at cooling the whole fin area.
You’d also get to see which heat pipes are transferring the most heat – as per fade2blac’s original comment.
I’d suspect there would be a warmer area in the center of the fan and towards the back of the heatsink – assuming it was a single block and not a split designs line the Noctua NH-D15
https://pcper.com/reviews/Cases-and-Cooling/Noctua-NH-D15-CPU-Cooler-Review
Noctua distributes the heat
Noctua distributes the heat pipes evenly through the cooler fins. They essentially have the heat pipes rotated 90 degrees. This cooler master has the heat pipes kind of on the edges; they are offset a little though (doesn’t show in picture posted on pcper). I wouldn’t think the thin fins would transmit the heat that well, so there may be a cooler area in the middle which isn’t actually doing much. I don’t know if the distribution of heat pipes actually makes much difference though. This cooler seems unnecessarily large, since quite a bit of the fin area is quite far from the heat pipes. The noctua looks like a better design; the cooler master is probably cheaper though, and may perform similarly. I think I would either go with a smaller cooler or jump to water cooling rather than these ridiculously large air coolers. A water cooler may not be as reliable (pump more likely to fail than fan, and adds a second point of failure), but it looks like it would be a lot easier to install.
Good idea to use Thermal
Good idea to use Thermal images to show what and how these tower heatsinks works.
The heat pipes have quite a
The heat pipes have quite a bit of contact with each other. The orientation may not make much difference.
“Much of a difference” is all
“Much of a difference” is all relative, but at least it doesn’t cost anything but time and some extra thermal grease to try. With Ivy and Haswell parts, quite a few people were up in arms over Intel’s choice to use a new TIM under the IHS instead of soldering them on. The argument there was that the new TIM was significantly less efficient at getting heat from the die to the IHS. Here we see a heatsink that could compound this issue by not optimally distributing heat from the core/IHS across all of those lovely heat pipes.
It’s also a virtually risk free experiment compared to more extreme measures such as lapping mating surfaces or de-lidding a CPU.
Most other coolers do not
Most other coolers do not have direct contact. The heat pipes go into a block which actually makes contact with the cpu lid. This is similar, but should perform even better than having a solid copper block; the thermal conductivity of heat pipes is generally significantly higher than solid metal (possibly an order of magnitude or more).
I agree that if the cooler can be mounted either way, then someone should test it to see if it makes a difference. I don’t think pcper has any of these for testing yet. Personally, I am not going to risk de-lidding, or really any extreme overclocking, for the cpu since cpu performance doesn’t make that much of a difference for applications I care about.
Weight?
Weight?
Heavyweight…just shy of 2
Heavyweight…just shy of 2 lbs.
Heatsink Weight: 732 g / 1.6 lb
Fan Weight: 154 g / 0.34 lb
Jesus, how do you keep this
Jesus, how do you keep this from tearing off your board?
You put it in a case that’s
You put it in a case that’s so small it JUST fits in, or you even have to hard-mod it in. (I recently did so with the Coolmaster v8 sticking out of a Thermaltake V1, cool!) that way it’s actually impossible for it to budge really!
Another awesome example is the Thors Hammer cooler inside of the In-Win Dragon Slayer case, it fits in with ZERO wiggle room once you slide in the case panel. Hilarious.. I love when that happens.
It didn’t even require a fan on it because the top case fan was so close it worked as is.
Cooler Master has had this
Cooler Master has had this Continuous Direct Contact feature for a while now. Their Hyper 212 EVO has it and it’s been a budget favourite for several years.
The first direct contact heatsinks were not very flat and gaps between the heatpipes and the rest of the contact block reduced the amount of contact with the CPU. Cooler Master’s Continuous Direct Contact feature in the Hyper 212 EVO heatsink was flatter and minimized the gaps between the heatpipes.
They actually still have
They actually still have models with non-continuous direct contact, too.