Alpenföhn ATLAS Mini-ITX/Micro-ATX CPU Cooler Review

Peter Donnell / 9 years ago

Final Thoughts

Price

The Alpenföhn Atlas 200W EDP Premium Twin Heatsink CPU Cooler can be purchased from Overclockers UK for a very reasonable £42.95. This may seem expensive, but given the build quality and performance we’ve seen today, it’s certainly competitive.

Overview

Alpenföhn has proven time and time again that they can make great products, and the Atlas is certainly no exception. This tiny little cooler manages to make a mockery of more expensive and much bigger coolers with relative ease and that’s something you simply cannot ignore when you’re building your next system. The compact nature of this cool makes it ideal for deploying in a small form factor PC case, yet offers big cooling performance and whisper quiet fans that put most 140mm low RPM solutions to shame. With this in mind, I wouldn’t feel bad about using it even in a system that wasn’t limited on space.

The fans on this cooler can push some serious air and still manage to generate more than a whisper of noise. I tested it quickly with a custom fan profile and found I could easily shave a few extra degrees off the totals when overclocked, and still have reasonable acoustics, but how hard you want to push them, or how much you’re trying to overclock will vary, so it’s certainly worth playing around with. Personally, this is still a smaller cooler, so I wouldn’t use it 24/7 for heavy overclocks, but it’ll be very well suited to mild overclocks and the use of boost clocks for gaming systems when the fans are on their stock profiles.

The installation process did take a while, but the nature of the mounting kit means that the Atlas sits nice and secure on your motherboard. The fans can be easily unclipped without the use of tools, so that’ll make maintaining and cleaning them easy enough. The inclusion of a tube of thermal paste is welcome too, as it means you can get more than a single installation/refresh out of the cooler without having to buy this separately.

The offset design of the towers aids with the installation of the cooler in whichever direction suits your build, but it’ll also allow you to avoid conflicts with memory modules, meaning you’re not going to be limited to low-profile solutions.

Pros

Wide range of motherboard/CPU support
Great build quality
Stylish design
Excellent cooling performance
Super quiet fans
High-quality thermal paste included

Cons

None

“The Alpenföhn Atlas may only stand 125mm tall and feature 92mm fans, but it’s able to keep up with the big boys when it comes to cooling and acoustics. This is a great cooler for any system build!“