Cooler Master MasterAir MA824 Stealth
Peter Donnell / 1 year ago
A Closer Look
Cooler Master isn’t reinventing the wheel here, this is a pretty traditional-looking air cooler design with two large cooling towers and a nicely packed array of fins forming the heatsink. It does look nice though, with a black anodized aluminium finish that looks pretty slick.
The top panel is a single piece and covers both towers as well as the central fan. It has a brushed aluminium finish too, and just caps off and hides the ends of the heatpipes, giving it a much cleaner aesthetic overall.
The heatpipe configuration is pretty extreme, with eight very thick-looking pipes running through both towers of the cooler and squeezing in edge to edge on the CPU block.
They are capped with a large polished contact plate, and there’s thermal paste pre-applied and through my careful handling and attention to detail, I smudged my thumb into it and ruined the photo, what a pro! Of course, I have to remove this anyway, as we use Noctua paste on all coolers for fairness in testing.
The middle of the cooler has a fan tucked into it, and due to the unique installation method, it doesn’t have to be removed to install the cooler like it would on the Noctua D15S.
There’s an additional fan included in the box, which attaches to the outside of the cooler.