X-bit labs

Originality or Efficiency? Cooler Master Mars, Eclipse and Hyper TX Cooling Solutions Reviewed (page 2)

Category: Coolers

by Sergey Lepilov

[ 12/15/2006 | 10:47 AM ]

The cooler’s design is indeed original. I haven’t met anything like this before. There are three heat pipes that go out of the copper base and stretch to the cooler’s top:

The pipes are gripped inside aluminum bars at the top and bottom. The bars also hold a number of aluminum plates that form a sphere. Notwithstanding the visual clumsiness, the cooler is not large at only 133x120x105mm. This is a moderate size as today’s air coolers go.

An aluminum piece with a Cooler Master logotype covers the blades at the top. The base is made out of copper:

The base is finished well, although not to the mirror shine characteristic of a majority of today’s super-coolers.

I checked out how flat the base is by looking at its trace on a piece of glass. The trace was perfect.

Inside the aluminum sphere there is a 90x25mm adjustable-speed fan. The fan speed controller, like the cooler at large, is designed in quite an original way:

The fan speed is selected by a jumper connected inline into the fan power circuit. The user can choose from a quiet mode of 1800rpm, a max speed of 3000rpm, and an automatic adjustment mode (by means of PWM) from 900rpm to 2500rpm.

As for the noise factor, the specifications declare a noise level of 17dBA, but this is only at the minimum speed of 900rpm. The specs don’t say how loud the cooler is at its max speed, but I can say that it is audible at 1800rpm and unbearably loud at 3000rpm.