Mrs. Shmee decided to help out my ongoing computer upgrade for Father’s Day, so she got me a new CPU fan. It is the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo. This fan fits a lot of chipsets, and it is reasonably priced, usually under $35, but is it any good? Well for my purposes it was well worth the price.
It is pretty much a large light weight aluminum heat-sync with four copper pipes running through it. It comes with one 120mm fan, but it has the brackets for one more if you decide that you need to move the air over your processor a little faster. The mounting brackets are adjustable so that you can put it on just about any CPU made, and it was perfect for my AMD FX-8320.
It is a little tall and the fan makes it kind of fat, but my Lian-Li PC-9F case was wide enough to fit it, and my low rise G.SKILL Ares RAM didn’t bump in to it. Though if you are going to buy one of these you definitely need to check out the dimensions of your case, and how your motherboard is laid out.
The 212 Evo is way quieter than the fan that came with the processor, and I was able to overclock the chip from 3.5GHz to 4GHz without increasing the voltage. Even with the overclock, my CPU is running cooler than with the stock fan. I could go probably go faster if I had a higher end motherboard, but 500MHz is nothing to sneeze at. I torture tested the CPU and fan using Prime95 for several hours to confirm that my overclock was stable, and it passed with flying colors. It was fun to see my chip run all eight cores flat out.
If your stock fan is not cutting it for your processer, the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo is a great upgrade. It doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, but it will run quiet and even let you overclock your chip a little. I am quite happy with mine, and I think you will like it too.