Having soldiered on masterfully since birth with the stock AMD cooler (in fairness it's no slouch for a stock unit) I decided that I would be nice to have a modest upgrade. Like anything which has a bit of a natural Venn diagram overlap between practical and fun (bikes and cars are other examples which spring to mind) a home built PC entices you to think along similar lines - many of you reading this will understand. Aside from the more obvious aesthetics it was always going to be an upgrade which would afford an improvement in one of two ways - more overclocking headroom and/or better temperatures. Whilst I like the idea of water cooling I am also mindful of both the upkeep and the introduction of a potentially volatile point of failure in return of more extreme cooling performance - to that end I ultimately find such justification unwarranted. It seems that my pragmatic/lazy side is winning such battles these days (probably a good thing) and so I decided to stick with an air cooler. Since day one the system performance has been sufficient for my needs and that remains the case. Perhaps this upgrade is probably best thought of as a well earned item of comfort.
So to satisfy performance and aesthetics was to narrow our options down to something which would work well and follow/enhance the dark appearance which dominated the original PC design. I've always thought that it could do with a little illumination in the middle zone of the PC, perhaps the only thing the stock Ryzen 1600 cooler was lacking - to choose RGB was a no brainer. This would narrow us down to the likes of BeQuiet, Coolermaster, Enermax and Noctua (the latter grey/black design models). The ultimate winner based on price to performance became Coolermaster, and so I present the new heart cooling system for Lain, the Coolermaster Hyper 212 RGB Black Edition.
As seems to be customary nothing ever goes as smoothly as you hope, and it's usually your own fault. It caught my attention that a couple of soundproofing grommets from an earlier mod to the rear case fan has unknowingly split, and so I decided to replace these. For reasons of cause and effect too silly to go into this resulted in me having to remove the PSU housing and reattach the fiddly front panel switches. A note to Corsair.. PLEASE try and make the panels fit a bit more flush and not allow a gap just the right size to allow a grommet to disappear into the power supply housing.. It's a bugger to get anything small enough to fall through back out.
Anyway..
The cooler fitting itself basically went as planned, consulting the old trusty mainboard manual and a very clear and concise video from You Tube (shout out to Gear Seekers for that!). I bought some Arctic thermal paste (still en route as we type) without believing even for one moment that Coolermaster would have been kind enough to provide some of their own, so kudos to them for putting a little tube in there. I still have my Arctic compound en route and it'll server me sometime down the line I'm sure. I don't think there will be enough variance to justify reapplying the Arctic stuff over the Coolermaster generic, but curiosity and OCD may yet get the better of me.
I was pleased and relieved to see that my reassembly wasn't in vain. Everything was OK from first bootup! Review-wise it seems as though it's going to be pretty awesome in performance. If the HW Monitor software is to be believed then the base CPU temperatures have indeed altered quite dramatically, coming down from a keen but still acceptable 38-40°C to a very balmy 26°C and holding. In fact the only thing I might give Coolermaster a little stick for is a "void if removed" warranty sticker which they elected to wrap around the fan cabling. It was a bit of a pain hiding that in the build, but you know first world problems and all that - it's not that important.
All that was left was to key in a suitable colour (apparently it's red by default) and this will change ad infinitum with my tinkering. In that respect performance was once again fine out of the stable, working flawlessly with the Aura RGB software which up to now has only had to handle the mainboard lighting. Overall I'm very happy with this cooler and even though it's early doors I'd recommend it in a heartbeat to anyone looking for such an upgrade. It was easy to work with and a modest £40 or so, which may be a little on the upper side of things Hyper 212 style. I suppose the aesthetics come with a little premium but that's okay for me because I'm not one for upgrading things at the drop of a hat.
