Cooler Master Hyper 212 Halo Black CPU Cooler Review

A Closer Look

The Silencio fan looks awesome, and it’s clearly one of their more premium case fans, or at least, it can be mounted to a traditional 120mm fan mount or radiator, rather than just being designed to only mount to this cooler, which certainly makes sense.

There’s a ring of plastic around the outside, which can be seen from the front and back, which will light up with the built-in ARGB LEDs. The fan is rated from 650 RPM to 2500 RPM at 12V PWM.

The tower looks stunning, and while the Hyper 212 series has slowly evolved over the years, it’s clearly come a very long way. We reviewed the 212 EVO 11 years ago, not even the first gen one, and it looks surprisingly basic by comparison. This is more like the 212X though, as it has the fourth heat pipe, but even then, the 212X looks pretty rough compared to this sleek tower.

From the side, you can see it’s densely packed with fins, starting quite low down to the socket, to make the most of the space available, while remaining slim enough to not conflict with any RAM configurations.

There’s a nice top cap on there too, which does add more surface area, but it’s largely ornamental, and there’s a gap under it so the heat pipes don’t touch it, so it likely shouldn’t be a hot surface when in use but does look great when installed.

As you can see though, the fits are actually stepped and overlapping, providing more surface area. This tooth-like effect will also cause a little turbulence in the air, so it interacts with the metal more and draws more heat, rather than just blowing the air right through before it has chance to pull much heat away.

The heatpipe design is simple enough, with an aluminium block and four spaced-out heatpipes with a direct contact design. It’s shockingly simple, but honestly, fantastically effective too. It’s four U-shaped pipes too, that all terminate separately, rather than being two that are folded through the cooler to look like four.