Coolermaster Hyper 212 Evo Review

 

 

Up Close

The EVO comes packed by Coolermaster in a classy looking satin finish white box with purple accents.  Images of the product and details of specification and features are given in the now familiar multi language format.  The box the review sample arrived in had clearly taken quite a knock but the cooler inside remained unharmed, bear in mind the box in the pictures was inside another larger transit box.  Nice though it would have been to take pictures of a pristine box, we can at least say we are able to evidence the effectiveness of the packaging.

  

       

      

 

Inside we find that Coolermaster have chosen the dreaded clear rigid heat formed plastic casing so much feared by fingers.  Once my sinking heart had recovered from the thought of having my fingers shredded I realised that it’s not totally encased, instead it merely sits in a sort of plastic basin.  So no worries whatsoever of finishing the job with fewer fingers than you started with….Which is nice…

Nestled in separate compartments so as to avoid damage to the main cooler are a selection of fittings and a set of instructions 

       

 

Once extracted the EVO reveals itself to be a mid sized tower cooler form the classics school of cooler design.  There are a great many coolers on the market with very similar looks.  Nothing wrong with that, if it ain’t broken don’t fix it.  Although not an LED model the smoked black of the fan does add a certain air of style to what could otherwise have been a very vanilla looking cooler.  While our eyes are pointed in the general direction of the fan it’s nice to see that Coolermaster have eschewed the usual spring clips as a method for holding the fans in place, choosing instead to utilise a plastic clip method somewhat similar to that becoming more common in a few cases these days.  I was never perfectly convinced that on occasion those old metal spring clips weren’t prone to a bit of a high frequency rattle.  Coolermaster have also included a second set of plastic clips and rubber isolation pads to enable you to mount a second fan in the same manner as the first.

       

       

 

Flipping the cooler over we get a better look at the “Continuous direct contact” layout of the heat-pipes.  Sure enough and good to their word Coolermaster have positioned the 4×6.0mm Heat-pipes pretty much in contact with each other.  I have to say that to a degree I can understand the rationale of the changes Coolermaster have made to the heat-pipe layout,  logic says if there’s more of the heat-pipe in contact and less of a gap in between for air pockets to form then the heat transfer must be improved.

 

       

 

Completing our tour of the cooler with a few views of the top of the unit we can see that it’s quite a slim affair at only 51mm (77mm including the fan).  There’s no fancy top caps to the heat-pipes as we’ve seen with other manufacturers recently, but Coolermaster have taken the usual step of embossing their logo onto the fins so as to be visible on the top fin.