Introduction
Cooler Master are one of the most established and recognised brands in the PC component industry. They’ve got a wide reach that covers everything from gaming peripherals with their CM Storm range, their chassis products, power supplies and obviously their CPU coolers. They’ve won countless awards in all the areas they cover, and they’ve even earned a few of those awards here at eTeknix. It is with this in mind that we have high expectation of the Hyper 103 CPU cooler I am reviewing today.
The Hyper 103 isn’t going to blow away the much of the competition with its performance, it is after all a small cooler with a budget friendly price tag. We will however be looking for competitive performance in this price range and given that Cooler Master already make some of the best budget coolers on the market, we don’t doubt it’ll do well.
Priced at around £18 it is hardly going to hurt your wallet and if you’re looking for a budget friendly solution this will likely be one of the first products you find. As you can see from the specifications below, the cooler has a good range of support for all major socket types for both AMD and Intel, but enough of the boring stuff, let’s get right to it and see what else the Hyper 103 has to offer.
The packaging is nothing too fancy, keeping with the usual informative design that we across the rest of the Cooler Master range. There are a few features listen on the front such as the tower design, triple heatpipes and the silent performance.
Around the back and the side of the box we have more details about what sockets the cooler supports, as well as the full specifications (see above).
In the box I found a couple of user manuals that detail the installation process as well as some warranty information. The mounting kit consists of the metal backplate, 2 Intel brackets, 2 AMD brackets, a set of screws / bolts and four plastic clips.
The mounting kit is well designed and durable, the back plate is reversible, one side if for AMD, the other is for Intel.
Nice cover! 😉
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Excellent and informative review peter …. having allready used the TX3 i was expecting good results from the hyper 103 and i wasnt dissapointed …. as i dont overclock the 103 fits the bill and the only downside being the blue led 92mm fan ( as my case uses 2 x 120mm red led,s … however im guessing you can use the clips i got with the TX3 that allow you to add a second fan and attach a red led fan to the heatsink )
i was also considering the freezer 7 pro however many have reported defective mounting systems which is unusual as arctic cooling are generally on the ball with their cpu and gpu coolers
many thanks for a excellent indepth review !
This is a great cooler.
When I played games or transcoded video on my AMD A10-5800K, the stock AMD HSF buzzed and struggled valiantly, keeping the APU at about 74°C. Mind you, this is playing games like StarCraft 2 and DOTA 2 at low-med settings.
Just installed this lil beauty (using Arctic Silver 5, FWIW) and played some DOTA 2 with all settings maxxed. The whole time the APU barely touched 55°C, mostly hovering around 54. Oh, and unlike the stock fan it couldn’t be heard over ambient noise.
We’ll see how this performs as time goes on, but to me 20 degrees cooler is an incredible result that was well worth the price of this cooler. It was a little fiddly to install – had to take off the fan to get one of the screws in, but it pops off and on very easily so that’s not a big hassle – but overall I couldn’t be happier!