CoolerMaster V8 and V10 heat sink fans

DESPITE THE INCREASED PRESENCE of water cooling kits, and even fridges and freezers - remember Asetek Vapochill and Thermaltake Xpressar? - air cooling still dominates as the omnipresent classic solution for taking CPU and system heat away from the chips and out of the box.

As heat has increased over time, the HSFs - heat sink fan combos - for CPUs and GPUs in particular have become more complex, such that by now they're often gigantic copper or aluminum fin arrays fed by multiple heat pipes taking heat from the chips to be dissipated by the wind from large, often high-RPM fans blowing air through the fins.

Here I look at the two top-end HSFs from the Taiwanese company CoolerMaster. While Thermaltake dispersed its eggs into the water and fridge cooler baskets as well, and Asetek has focused on sealed liquid cooling, CoolerMaster has stayed true to the air cooling approach, and it has the highest-end devices in the market now, the jumbo sized V8 and V10.

While most uberclass air HSFs use six heat pipes, the V8 has eight, and the V10 has, well, ten. The analogy with car cylinders may not be ideal, but yes, the added heat pipes should have a similar performance benefit. Note that the two added heat pipes in the V10 cool the TEC - a Thermo Electric Cooler, or Peltier junction, essentially a heat inverter - device integrated into the cooler. While it brings the total cooling capacity beyond 200 Watts per CPU, the TEC actually sends some extra heat of its own to the fins, so the fins will feel hotter than in the V8, and I tested that on both X48 Core 2 Quad and the X58 Core i7.

I tested both behemoths on the Core i7 975 CPU with Asus Rampage II Extreme combo, running at 4GHz and fed off a Corsair HX1000 PSU. The 4GHz CPU core, 3.2 GHz uncore and DDR3-1600 CL6 setup is now a stable reference combination with any high end cooler I throw at it. I also had the Thermalright 120mm six-heat pipe HSF next to it, sped up using a Thermaltake 2,800 RPM 120mm fan for a comparison. The hostile test environment was Singapore's heat at 32 degrees C or 90 F with 90 per cent humidity, with no outside extra air cooling.

Note the V10 was mounted opposite the recommended way, where the extension fan would be above the memory DIMMs, as I was replacing the memories often for the test.

I checked both the BIOS hardware monitor temperatures as well as the Sandra temperature monitor spikes when running their CPU benchmark routine at 100 per cent full load across all CPU cores, and here it is:

Temp        Idle     Peak

ThRight      46 C   78 C

CM V8        45 C   75 C

CM V10      44 C   73 C

As you can see, the V10 wins in all cases by a notch:

But even in the Sandra full load spike, that notch isn't that much:

In summary, yes the V8 with a 2,200 RPM fan wins over the 6-pipe Thermalright even with the latter turbocharged by a 2,800 RPM fan. The difference is only 1 degree C at idle and 3 degrees C at full load spike, but it's still a difference. The delta between the two brethren is more intriguing: only 1 degree at idle, practically within the margin of error, and only 2 degrees at the peak load spike. So, yes, the V10 will give a bit of that extra margin when, say, running Linpack stable at 4GHz, or a 3Dmark Vantage CPU physics test, but otherwise the V8 is nearly just as good. But the V10's extra second fan can cool your memory and surrounding mainboard area too, and, after all, the contraption looks so much more intimidating, doesn't it?

Good
Good looks for V8, superb looks for V10, incredible cooling performance for an air HSF.

Bad
Not cheap with the $50 to $90 price tag depending upon where you buy, need easier fan replacement with faster ones if preferred.

Ugly
The V10 can be mistaken for a car vacuum cleaner by the uninitiated.

Beers for both
9/10