Cooler Master Hyper N520 Heatsink

 

So over the last few pages we’ve take a pretty solid thorough look over the Cooler Master Hyper N520, so what can we conclude about it? Well for starters, it’s a pretty nifty looking heat sink. Unless you have something against the form that a lot of heat sinks today adopt you can’t say it’s particularly bad aesthetically. The plastic shroud could have been made out of aluminium to make it a little better looking but never the less, the plastic does the job. The build quality certainly isn’t to be sniffed at either. The N520 feeling so sturdy that once mounted you can pick up the setup and wave it around without fear of losing it to a nearby wall.

 

So the crucial factor comes into sight next, how the heat sink performs. Looking at the first test, it kept the CPU well within reasonable temperatures, not exceeding 60°C under load even when the chip was overclocked using a generous amount of Vcore. The simulated load test shows again that the N520 is a capable cooler. It trounced the Intel stock cooler across the board, managing to hold 200w at under 60°C where as Intel’s cooler rocketed up to a hairs breadth over 100°C. When pitted against OCZ’s Vendetta II however, the N520 wasn’t quite as impressive. The result’s were too close to call at the lower wattage levels, but as the power increased the gap between the two widened. While the Vendetta produced lower results, however, the N520 was nipping at its heels the whole time. And even the widest gap at 200w was only around 3°C.