by Sergey Lepilov
08/11/2006 | 09:36 AM
For an inexperienced user the name of Cooler Master might be indicative of the highest quality among non-suggestive brands like Zalman, Scythe, GlacialTech or Titan. Perhaps only Thermaltake sounds just as meaningful as Cooler Master . Well, it’s of course bad practice to choose components only by the name of the manufacturer, yet some products from Cooler Master have really established it as a maker of high-quality cooling solutions. One can recall the famous Hyper 6 as an example.
Now that the heat dissipation of modern processors has got lower, the manufacturers of CPU coolers need to adjust their model range accordingly. Large and heavy, and mostly copper, monsters are currently being replaced with light and quiet aluminum coolers on heat pipes that cool the CPU with the same or better effectiveness. Cooler Master is not aloof from this process and announces the Hyper 7 (HCA-F61) model also known as Hyper UC . The new cooler is not positioned as a hi-end solution and doesn’t claim to be a super-cooler, but this doesn’t make it less interesting to us. We will check out its efficiency, noisiness, installation peculiarities and overclocking-related aspects in this review.
We received the new cooler from Cooler Master for a brief test. It came to our labs in a transparent plastic package without any insignia. So, we are dealing with a pre-release sample of the product. The Hyper 7 (HCA-F61) will begin to ship officially at the end of September. Serial samples of the cooler will have a transparent package that will look like this:
The large and beautiful fan catches your eyes immediately after you take the cooler out of its box. The fan looks as if it is chromium-plated or polished to a mirror shine.
This is not metal, however, but plastic. The center of the fan resembles a plane’s propeller. The intricately shaped blades, nine in total, provide an air stream of ~71CFM at a rotation speed of ~2500.
The cooler follows the “tower” design with three copper heat pipes soldered to the copper base. The diameter of the pipes is about 6 millimeters.
There are a total of 49 aluminum plates on the heat pipes. An aluminum casing covers their sides and top.
This helps utilize the air stream from the fan in the most efficient way.
There is another small aluminum heatsink in the bottom part of the cooler, right above the copper base and the heat pipes.
The cooler’s fan is secured on the aluminum frame with four screws; the frame itself is fastened to the bottom heatsink.
There are no rubber pads between the aluminum frame and the fan, but I think they would help reduce noise and vibration (the maximum fan speed is 2500rpm after all).
The fan is made by Cooler Master in China and marked as А9025-25RB-4AP-F1. It consumes about 4.8 watts at a current of 0.4 amperes.
The transparent carcass of the fan and its “chromium-plated” blades just call for LED-based highlighting, but this model lacks it, unfortunately.
A piece of polyethylene film protects the base against scratches.
The standard warning on this film (that you should remove it prior to installing the cooler), doesn’t always work with certain users, but anyway. The cooler’s base is flat under the film, but is not finished. You can even feel the traces of the milling machine with your fingers.
A small box in the bottom of the package includes the following accessories:
There is no installation manual with our sample of the Hyper 7, but it’s only because it is a pre-release version of the product. You will surely get a manual with a serial sample of the cooler.
It’s not too difficult to install the Hyper 7 cooler on the mainboard, but not too easy, either. The fact is you have to take the mainboard out of the system case irrespective of the platform. And you have to take the mainboard out, too, if you want to replace your CPU because the cooler is always fastened with screws from the reverse side of the mainboard. It doesn’t hitch at the socket’s retention frame as some other coolers do.
So, you fasten the mounting plate to the cooler’s base with four screws. Choose the right plate for your mainboard:
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When I received the cooler I found that the screws were already inserted into the LGA775 plates. So, if you are going to install your Hyper 7 on Socket 754, 939, 940 or AM2, you should first put those screws into the appropriate holes in the plate and then fasten the plate to the cooler’s base. When you’re installing the Hyper 7 on Socket AM2, you can insert the screws after the plate is secured on the cooler, but it’s going to be problematic with Socket 754/939/940 (at least when you’ll try to insert them from the fan side).
Then you should remove the protective layer from the included rubber circles and glue them to the mounting holes on the mainboard. After that, you can install the cooler on the mainboard, choosing its orientation as to organize airflows in the most efficient way, if possible. To direct the air stream towards the rear panel of the system case on mainboards for AMD K8 processors it is necessary that the holes on the mainboard are placed at right angle to the rear panel rather than in parallel to it (which is often the case).
The cooler installation procedure is an exercise for equilibrists. You have to press the cooler tight to the mainboard with one hand (and the mainboard should also be somehow held in place) and fasten nuts on the reverse side of the mainboard through spacers and a back-plate. I found an easier way, though. Sit down and hold the cooler upside down with your legs. Then put the mainboard down on the cooler’s fastening screws, put the back-plate, and fasten the nuts with the included spanner. Make sure that nothing interferes in the near-socket space and that the mainboard is not bended. Don’t fasten the nuts to the full right away. Just put them on the screws by a couple of turns, then turn the mainboard upside down and check everything out. Then you can fully tighten the nuts. You’ll have the following on the reverse side of your mainboard:
Such an inconvenient way of fastening the cooler kills any desire to change the processor or, for example, test thermal pastes with the Hyper 7. But at least this fastening is reliable, that’s sure. When installing the cooler on LGA775, you turn the nuts with the same spanner, but through the plastic spacers, and do not use a back-plate. The height of the fastened nuts is 6mm whatever you use, the back-plate or the plastic spacers.
You’ll have the following in your system case as the result (with a Socket 939 mainboard):
Inside the system case the Socket 939 platform will look as follows:
I want to note once again that the cooler can be oriented in any of four possible positions on LGA775. When testing the Hyper 7 on this platform, I positioned it in such a way that the air stream from its fan was directed towards the 120mm system fan on the rear panel of the system case.
The official specification of the Cooler Master Hyper 7 cooler is listed in the following table.
Unfortunately, we have no information about the price of the new cooler from Cooler Master, but as far as I know it is going to sell in China for 210-230 yuan (or about $30 US). There is also no info about the weight of the cooler, and we forgot to weigh it during the brief test session. Subjectively, the Hyper 7 feels like it weighs about 400 grams.
We usually pick up opponents for a tested product basing on the price factor. Having no official info about the price of the Hyper 7, I took a super-cooler Thermaltake Big Typhoon, a less efficient Scythe Mine, and boxed coolers for Intel Celeron D and AMD Athlon 64 processors. The tested was configured out of the following components:
The tests were performed in Windows XP Professional Edition Service Pack 2. We used the same thermal paste with all the coolers and disabled the automatic fan speed management systems in the mainboards’ BIOSes.
SpeedFan version 4.28 was used to monitor the temperatures and fan speeds:
The CPU was heated up by running the FPU test from S&M version 1.8.0 (alpha) at 100% load for 15 minutes.
I also simulated a Game test mode by running 3DMark06’s Firefly Forest test with 16x anisotropic filtering and without full-screen antialiasing for 20 times. The temperature was read from the sensor integrated into the CPU.
The coolers were tested in a closed system case that was equipped with two rather quiet 120mm system fans for intake and exhaust and one 120mm fan on the side panel. Three test cycles were performed for each cooler and the results were averaged. I waited for 40-45 minutes for the temperature to stabilize during each test.
The ambient temperature was monitored by means of an electric thermometer and remained within 22.1-22.7°C.
To put the coolers under a heavier load, I overclocked the AMD Athlon64 3200+ processor from its default 2000MHz to 2755MHz frequency with a core voltage increase to 1.625V.
The latest available version of CPU-Z reports the core voltage wrongly – I had set it at 1.625V in the mainboard’s BIOS Setup.
The following results were obtained on the AMD platform:
The standard aluminum cooler you receive with your boxed AMD Athlon 64 processor isn’t very efficient. Moreover, its fan became as fast as ~4700rpm during the test, and so the noise from that cooler was unacceptably high for a home computer. Well, it’s good at least that the simple aluminum cooler just coped with a CPU overclocked to nearly 2.67GHz with a voltage increase.
The new product from Cooler Master does well in this test, being just a little worse than the leader Thermaltake Big Typhoon. The expensive and near-silent Scythe Mine is about 5°C behind under the S&M load. However, you should be aware that the noise produced by the Hyper 7 is audible against the background noise of a quiet system case, even though its tonality is not irritating as it is the case with some other CPU coolers.
It’s not surprising that the Cooler Master Hyper 7 is so close in performance to the recognized super-cooler Thermaltake Big Typhoon. The 120mm fan of the latter creates an air stream of 62CFM whereas the Hyper 7’s 92mm fan rotates at 2500rpm and creates an air stream of 71CFM. The product of Cooler Master is the noisier of the two.
So, I’m quite pleased with the performance of the Cooler Master Hyper 7 on the AMD platform, especially considering its not optimal position on the mainboard. Now let’s check it out with an Intel processor.
The second processor in this review is still a new product and is interesting to overclockers with its high overclockability in the first place. For example, the best of four samples of Celeron D 352 and 356 processors on the new Cedar Mill core we had received for tests remained stable under the S&M utility when the FSB was overclocked to 200MHz:
We’ll publish a review of these processors, too, but now let’s get back to the coolers.
The boxed cooler included with the Celeron D has a copper base and is quite efficient, but its noise is perfectly audible at night in an adjacent room behind a closed door. So, you can use it when you are overclocking processors, but not at home. It’s just too noisy.
The Hyper 7 looks good, leaving the silent Scythe Mine behind by 3°C and being just a little worse than the Thermaltake Big Typhoon under S&M. Again, it’s up to you to decide what you need more, silence or cooling efficiency. Do not forget that the price of the Hyper 7 is not yet certain, so perhaps we should instead compare it with products from some other price category (I wish it were a lower category).
Talking about the noise level of this cooler, its 4-pin fan connector allows using a PWM-based automatic adjustment of the fan speed depending on the CPU temperature. Well, a majority of modern mainboards for AMD processors allow setting up (in the BIOS Setup) a speed range within which the CPU cooler’s speed must remain. It means that the noise from the cooler may be reduced when the CPU is under low loads.
And so the downside of the Hyper 7 cooler is how it is installed on the CPU. You have to take the mainboard out of the system case and show some dexterity to do everything right. This won’t be a problem for PC integrators, though, who only have to do this once. The cooler’s base is flat, but not very thoroughly finished. The noise level is average and you can lower it somewhat by using the automatic fan speed management available on your mainboard. What’s good about this cooler is its performance which is only a little lower than that of the Thermaltake Big Typhoon. The Cooler Master Hyper 7 is also light and compatible with all the modern platforms, including the new Socket AM2.
However, it is the price that is going to determine the market success of the Hyper 7. I guess $30-35 US would be an optimal price for this product because more expensive products are better than the Hyper 7 in terms of performance and noise.
Highs:
Lows:
