CPU Air Cooler Mega Test

Introduction

If you're a regular visitor to the pages of OC3D you'll no have noticed a bit of dearth of cooler reviews.  The reason for this is simple, we've retired the old 2011 rig and have been busy specking up and putting together a new test rig. Not that the 2011 rig wasn't up to it anymore, it's still going like the privy door when the plague's in town, it's just that times move on and so must we.  It's also taken a bit of time to get all the coolers we want to test together in one place.  In fact there are so many coolers even my wide angle lens couldn't fit them all into the image you see above.  So how many are we talking about?  Well in total we'll be looking at roughly 35 coolers from manufacturers such as Noctua, SilverStone, Raijintek, beQuiet, CoolerMaster, Arctic, Alpenfohn, Gelid, Scythe, and for the first time ever at OC3D, Cryorig.  As i'm writing this introduction, testing has yet to commence and to be honest i'm doing a little bit of mental calculation on the side as to just long it's going to take to bring together this behemoth of a review.  With 35 coolers to get through and each cooler taking roughly 30 minutes to fit and then later remove, and one and a half hours to test that's a grand total of 70 hours of testing, and then of course you have to factor in the additional time it takes when the coolers are avsolute sods to fit and remove as invariably some will be.  So when we say Mega test, we mean Mega test.  To make things easier we'll be sorting the coolers into groups by brand, looking at each of them individually then giving a round up of our thoughts at the end.  We're going to put the graphs towards the front of the review on page 3, with links to the coolers to make it easier for you guys to get to the detail quickly.

Sadly we only have one CoolerMaster cooler on test (which was one from a review a few months back) we did ask them for coolers but by the time we had started testing none had arrived and by then we were already a month or so in with a big pile of other coolers so sadly they have missed out on playing a bigger role in this one.

Technical Specification