Cooler Master has designed Hyper 612S as a CPU cooler with very good performance, but not at the expense of noise, or better yet silence. The cooler arrived in the recognisable packaging, containing the usual mounting clips for all CPU sockets, as well as a detailed manual, which is something that we always salute. Besides that, there was also room for a decent thermal paste, rubber buffers used when mounting the cooler to an AMD socket, and an extra set of plastic fan holders and the accompanying rubber buffers, so that the amount of vibrations is reduced to the minimum.

As Cooler Master’s focus has obviously been on silence this time around, there’s even a tiny cable with a resistor included in the set, in order to reduce the default fan rate of 1300 RPM to 900 RPM. However, as we have our own RPM rate measurement tools in our test lab, we’ve determined that this cable actually reduces the said rate to 700 RPM. At this speed, the fan is literally silent, although the noise produced at 1300 RPM is far from annoying too. The fan cable’s default length is 30 cm, which is extended to 45 cm if the resistor cable is used - more than enough in both cases. The fan-to-body mounting mechanism is flawless, as simply tightening the plastic holder screws will end all your installation misery, as everything is clip-based. The same goes for mounting the whole cooler onto the motherboard, although you will need to remove the motherboard from the case in order to install the cooler backplate (unless you have a sufficiently large opening on the other side, which is sometimes the case in gaming enclosures).

Hyper 612S has six copper heatpipes going through the copper base. The heatpipes are 6 mm thick and pass through aluminium plates with a surface of 140 x 128 mm. The cooling body itself is about 16 cm tall, and the reason that Cooler Master has succeeded in making this cooler so quiet is that the space between individual plates has been increased a bit, to 2.3 mm. In practice, this means less “hooting” while air’s passing between the plates, which is the main factor in the overall noise a cooler produces. The base’s finish leaves a bit to be desired, but it should be noted that it has a size of 44 x 37 mm, which means that it’ll cover all modern CPUs with ease.

And now to the most interesting part of this review, which is Hyper 612S’ performance. First things first, though - let’s have a look at the testing process. The CPU choice ended up on Core i7 2600K, overclocked to 4.6 GHz under a full load voltage of 1.43 V. The CPU was made sweating by the LinX application, reputed for the absolutely maximum amount of stress it places on the CPU. The model at hand was compared against Cooler Master’s Hyper 212+. Furthermore, two sets of fans have been used. The first one is the stock cooler that comes preinstalled on 612S. The second set was a push-and-pull combo, i.e. one fan in the front for intake and another on the back for exhaust. We simply wanted to see whether these different usage scenarios would adversely impact performance and noise, and what the optimal solution was.

The results say the following. At the minimum RPM rate, Hyper 612S achieves stunning results, while maintaining an extremely low noise level. Its 700 RPM rate makes it virtually silent. The charts further show that performance doesn’t scale with the RPM rate, at least not as well as is the case with Hyper 212+, but having in mind the cooler’s design, this was to be expected. We expected the new model to win easily on all fronts against the older one, but we can’t say that we weren’t surprised by such a large difference margin at minimum RPM. Still, the difference in price remains, and Hyper 212+ continues to be the performance king in the 30€ range. On the other hand, if you want better performance, but also a cooler that’s all but silent, and are willing to cash out a few euros more to get that splendid combo in one product, Hyper 612S is the way to go.