Hyper TX3 EVO

I give it 5 stars because it was so cheap and fairly easy to fit and install and it was the only fan in my pc i had for cooling my old budget gaming pc, cpu was fx 6300, disclaimer i had an open pc case all side panels removed after all my case fans had died over the years.Yet it still manged to keep my cpu around a nice 70 C temperature while intense gamimg, fan wasn't that loud or noticeable while wearing headphones with a microphone.Fan lasted for 3-4 years before it failed and it was so cheap i just brought another one, the fan was detachable so i didn't even need to remove the metal grid fin heat sink.Also i hardly ever turned off my pc and it still working today.

Ok so I gave this a 5 star rating and this mainly comes down to what you get for your money - I bought this to replace the standard Intel CPU cooler on my Skylake i5 which was horrendously loud. Given that my CPU was a non-overclockable one I plumped for a budget solution which is really all you will need. I just dont get the fascination with huge coolers and water cooling on non-overclocked chips.Anyway the cooler is nice and quiet and the fan that you see on the picture can be taken off and in my case I moved it up slightly so that it now fits nicely above my RAM slots - CPU temps are well within good levels although pretty much any cooler can keep non K chips cool so nothing groundbreaking there.The clips are slightly fiddly to get in compared to the nice and easy slotting Intel but with a bit of care and application you can get those satisfying clicks on all 4 corners as the hooks engage on the other side of the mobo. Would have lost half a star for this but due to the cheap price this is acceptable.You also get a bracket for another fan and a small tube of Cooler Master's own brand thermal paste which should be good for a few applications. Remember thermal paste lasts a long time (years and years) and as long as you don't contaminate it you should be fine with resetting the cooler as and when you need to (i.e. to change ram modules in my case). It's not complicated and again too many people make it more complicated than it needs to be - but hey that's the PC crowd for you.I bought this for under a tenner from Amazon warehouse, unused although box was a bit tatty. If you can find it for a tenner than I recommend this. Otherwise any decent cooler will do. Try the Arctic which is about £7. Remember CPUs are built to last and built to go up to around 95 degrees so unless you're overclocking you'll never reach those temps so ANY cooler will keep your cpu at a good temp. BUT the sound/quietness is a different matter and this is where you need to do some research.

I bought this to replace the stock cooler on my CPU as in the last few months it had started to overheat, reaching 60 degrees centigrade under full load, at which point the motherboards self-protection features would kick in, and turn the CPU speed down to prevent it getting any hotter and being damaged. The heat-sink was fluff free and the fan blades clean (I had already removed them both and thoroughly cleaned them!)Initial impression of it were good. It looks like it is well made, feels solid without being massively heavy, and is well packaged.While it does come with a host of fittings, these are because it is made to fit a variety of different types of CPU. It was easy for me to identify the correct two fittings for my AMD processor without even needing to check the instructions before hand. when I did check my guess had been correct. It also ships with its own thermal paste, but I did not use it, preferring to use "Artic Silver 5" Arctic Silver 5 AS5 Premium 3.5g tube instead.Fitting was a bit of a fiddly affair: The two parts of the mounting clip do not hold together until the whole thing is locked into place- the locking lever kept falling off. This was mostly because I did not wish to unplug all the cables etc from the PC so I could move it to a location with better lighting while at the same time lay the PC on its side to improve access, and partly because it is a rather large cooler, restricting access and visibility to the clips.Even so it still took under 20 minutes. Had I not been lazy it would have probably taken 5 mins to fit the cooler + 15 minutes unplugging an re-attaching all the cables on the back of the PC- no quicker but less of a fiddle. The clips I needed allow it to be fitted in 4 orientations North-South, South-North, East-West, West-East, meaning I was able to get the fan to blow the hot air it produces directly towards an exhaust fan at the back of the case. If the case had had top-mounted exhaust fans I could have (space permitting) fitted the cooler to blow the hot air toward the top.SO, does it actually WORK?The CPU now reports a temperature 0 to 2 degrees below the motherboard's temperature at idle. My PC always did this when it was new (I have a case fan blowing room temp air in almost directly above the CPU, and this is the air the CPU cooler mostly uses to cool the CPU with, rather than air from inside the case, hence how the CPU can be at case air temp or below.)Under full load the CPU fluctuates between 43 & 48, depending on the MB's temp, never seeming to get more that 15 degrees hotter than case temp, instead of getting to 60 and clock-throttling while at the same time bringing up "There are some warnings: CPU TEMPERATURE." on the screen.When it does get up to 48 one can almost see the "heat pipe" technology cut in (Imagine the coolant boiling and carrying away the heat) and the temp drops back down again by 3 or 4 degrees. A four hour test at full 100% load on both cores saw it stabilize at 45. Had I not fitted an Akasa GRM92-AL01-BK 92mm Aluminium Fan Filter to the fan it might even do better as a cooler. It is also nice and quiet at idle.AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual core 5400+ 2.8Ghz CPU in custom home built PC.Minor edit. The side panel fan fouled the top of one of the heat-pipes EVER so slightly when I went to permanently refit the side panel of the case properly, (up till then I had been just "hanging" the side panel on) preventing the side panel fitting properly. Had the side panel fan been 5mm further toward the front of the case it would not have been a problem. 20 seconds with a "plastic knife" (A soldering iron attachment) removed a 10mm wide by 3mm deep bit from the fan cowling in the relevant location, problem solved.The coolers performance is getting better, which is inline whith the claims made my the makers of "Artic Silver 5"Quote "During the CPU's initial use, the compound thins out to enhance the filling of the microscopic valleys and ensure the best physical contact between the heatsink and the CPU core. Then the compound thickens slightly over the next 50 to 200 hours of use to its final consistency designed for long-term stability. "This is in line with my experience, as the max temp the CPU is getting to is now more like 9 degrees above ambient, and improving.