Cooler Master Hyper N620 Review

airman - 2009-08-26 04:20:17 in CPU Cooling
Category: CPU Cooling
Reviewed by: airman   
Reviewed on: September 8, 2009
Price: $59.99

Introduction:

Over the past few years, the CPU heatsink market has exploded with many new products - and that alone can make it difficult to narrow down potential selections, even before looking at the specifications of each candidate. With overclocking becoming more and more popular, the demand for aftermarket heatsinks has shot up drastically. So manufacturers, even new ones that are sprouting up, are constantly putting out new coolers to suit its customers' individual needs. There are big ones and small ones. Some are made of copper, while some are aluminum, or sometimes it's a combination of the two. Cooler Master has been consistently putting out new cooling products; those of which work quite well. I am anxious to see how the Hyper N620 from Cooler Master performs. Since this is actually the first Cooler Master heatsink I've had my hands on, it adds to my anticipation to get the ball rolling and get it right into testing. However, I first need to check out the package, its features, and evaluate its looks.

 

Closer Look:

The Hyper N620 is packaged in a white and purple box, similar to that of the packaging scheme of other Cooler Master products. The package makes it obvious that it is LGA 1366 compatible, as it blares blatantly beside the heatsink's picture and above all the other socket compatibilities. This makes sense for Cooler Master to make this clear, as LGA 1366 is becoming more and more popular - plus the infamous i7 chips from Intel run hot... very hot. At the bottom of the front face, other compatible processors are listed. On one of the sides, it lists all of its mount compatibilities; LGA 775, LGA 771 (Skulltrail only), AM2+, AM2, Socket 939, and Socket 754. The other side displays "CPU Cooler - For more information please visit our website" in about 20 different languages.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once out of the box, I noted how big the cooler is. I was interested to get it completely out of the package, where it was sandwiched between two pieces of fitted plastic that snaps together. Loosely inside the box itself were two sets of paper, a warranty slip and a very large, fold-out, quick-setup instruction manual.

 

 

 

Included are all the supported motherboard backplates and brackets, thermal paste, required screws, rubber dampers, nuts and a socket for a screwdriver to tighten the nuts, the manual, and a warranty booklet. The rubber dampers are adhesive-backed and stick to the motherboard brackets on the surface that gets bolted down. The last picture is how one of these brackets look assembled, with the rubber damper and the through screw. The one neat thing I noticed about the through screw was that it was threaded backwards. Cooler Master did this so that when tightening the nuts down from the back side of the motherboard, the through screws wouldn't back out nor require a screwdriver on the other side holding them in place. This was a convenient solution.

 

 

With everything unpacked, I'll be taking a closer look at the heatsink on the next page.

Closer Look:

The size of the Hyper N620 is the first thing I noticed. It is a 120mm heatsink, which is pretty much the norm nowadays, but the two fans on either side of the unit and the heatpipe standoff from the base make it look quite large. Once it was in my hand, it didn't feel very heavy and I wasn't uncomfortable with the fact that it will soon be directly bolted to, and towering off of the testbeds motherboard. I was actually pleasantly surprised at the weight of the cooler. The aluminum fins are quite sturdy and don't flex very much under pressure. The six heatpipes that the Hyper N620 offers are all copper, which is now fairly common.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The two included 120mm fans are well-disguised blue LED fans. Due to its color, I didn't expect it to be lit. The darker, but slightly translucent blades shows a nice, subtle glow that isn't too bright. They are wired together so that only one plug is required to run into the motherboard, which is a standard 4-pin, PWM header. They operate off of 12v and have a current draw of 0.37A each. At full speed they are audible, but not too bothersome - and I am usually pretty picky about noise. The tops of the fans attach into the metal cover at the top of the heatsink with screws, and the bottoms of the fans have rubber "plugs" that slip between a small cutout in the fins themselves. The rubber plugs help eliminate noise caused by vibration, of which I heard none.

 

 

 

The base of the Hyper N620 doesn't leave much to be desired. It is pretty close to mirror finish with no machine marks, as seen in the picture below. Looking at it straight on, my nose's reflection was a little bit "pinched", which indicated that the base was slightly concave. This concavity is extremely slight, but noticeable by the reflection in the picture below. A quick and easy lap job would fix this, but I will be testing this cooler as is from the factory. I also noticed that the heatpipes didn't make direct contact with the copper plate, and some sort of filler material was used, also seen in the picture below. Judging simply on this, the Hyper N620 would probably perform better if they were fit better into the contact plate.

 

 

 

Once installed, the size is pretty obvious. It is oriented in a way so that it won't block access to the memory slots, whereas not all heatsinks have taken this into consideration. Recently though, this hasn't been an issue. I did not fit this cooler in a case with a top-mount power supply, but I can say that if it does fit that it would be very tight. If the test case were only less than an inch skinnier, I would have trouble getting the Hyper N620 to fit, if at all. It didn't have a problem clearing the northbridge heatsink, and that is due to the larger heatpipe standoff that I mentioned earlier. A picture of the amount of glow the LEDs emit is below. I tried to carefully set my exposure levels so that the picture is what is observed with the naked eye.

 

 

 

With the heatsink installed, let's check out the manufacturer specifications on the next page, and then test and compare this heatsink to others.

Specifications:

Model
RR-B20-N620-GP
CPU Socket

Supports Core i7 with Socket LGA 1366
Intel Socket T (LGA 775); Socket J (LGA 771 Skulltrail only)
AMD Socket AM2+ / AM2 / 939 / 754
CPU Support

Intel Core 2 Extreme / Core 2 Quad / Core 2 Duo / Pentium D / Celeron / Celeron D
AMD Phenom X4 Quad Core / Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core / Pentium 4 / Phenom X3 Triple Core / Athlon 64 FX / Athlon 64 / Sempron
Dimensions

5.54(L) x 3.80(W) x 6.33(H) inches
or
140.8(L) x 96.4(W) x 160.7(H) mm
Weight
1.87 lbs or 847 g
Heatsink Material
Cu base, Al fins
Heatpipes
Six 6mm heatpipes
Fan Dimensions

4.72(W) x 4.72(H) x 0.98(L) inches
or
120(W) x 120(H) x 25(L) mm
Fan Speed
800~2000 R.P.M.
Fan Airflow
83.6 CFM (Max)

Air Pressure (mmH2O)
4.43 mmH2O (Max)
Bearing Type
Rifle Bearing

Fan Life Expectancy
40,000 hours

Fan Noise Level (dB-A)
16~28 dBA
Connector
PWM

 

Features

 

Information courtesy of Cooler Master @ http://www.coolermaster-usa.com/product.php?category_id=1623&product_id=2881

Testing

Testing of the heatsink will involve load simulated by Prime95 using small FFTs, in stock and overclocked scenarios. Idle and load temperatures will be recorded. Load temperatures will be the maximum value displayed in RealTemp after running 8 threads in Prime95 for an hour, and idle temperatures will be the minimum value recorded by RealTemp with no computer usage after one hour. The temperature values for each of the four cores will be averaged to get one value for the comparison values. The ambient temperature is held at a constant 25°C throughout testing of the Hyper N620, as well as the comparison heatsinks. All the data shown in the graphs is in Celsius. The thermal paste Cooler Master included was very dry and I had difficulty spreading it over the heatsink's base, so I used Arctic Silver Ceramique as an alternative for all comparison heatsinks.

Testing Setup:

Comparison Heatsinks:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The temperatures were right about where I expected them. These i7 chips do run quite hot, and I was thinking that overclocked load would be low 70s after evaluating the cooler in-depth. The temperatures stayed at a comfortable level when overclocked, nearly 20°C cooler than the stock Intel heatsink.

Conclusion:

The Cooler Master Hyper N620 lived up to my expectations. It is solidly built, engineered well, and performs well. The heatsink works on a variety of mounting types, even back to socket 754, which I was surprised about. The Hyper N620's base is slightly concave, as I pointed out the "pinch" on my nose while looking at my reflection in the otherwise mirrored finish base. I did check with a straight edge up against a light, and it was clear that there was a slight concavity. Not much, but it was there. Also, the heat pipes weren't flush on the sides of the base and had some unknown compound to fill the cracks. If the base was completely square and the heat pipes were more snugly fit into the base, I'm sure that a few extra degrees could have been squeezed out of this one. While nearly polished to a mirror finish, more still could have been done to the base as well as the heat pipe contact with it.  I believe that Cooler Master would have an excellent cooler if a little more attention was paid to these areas. Nonetheless, this cooler can be had for about $50 and the price to performance ratio is very reasonable.

 

Pros:

 

Cons: