Cooler Master TX3i CPU Cooler Review
Peter Donnell / 9 years ago
A Closer Look
The fan is a 92mm Cooler Master A9225 12V PWM model. For a budget cooler, it’s a really nicely quality fan and is aesthetically pleasing, so it’s nice to see they haven’t cheaped out here.
The cooling tower is nice and compact but has a good fin stack and a really clean-looking design. The open sided design should allow for great airflow throughout and there are fan clip mounts available on both sides of the tower. This means you can have the fan on either side or install two fans should you need the extra airflow.
The fan clips into place easily enough using the snap-on plastic mounts. Once mounted, it certainly looks nice and provides perfect coverage of the entire fin stack for maximum cooling performance.
There’s a small block for the CPU that helps merge the heat pipes a little better, and you’ll notice that the fin stack starts quite high, ensuring that there are no conflicts with motherboard components, such as VRM cooling.
The cooler uses stock cooler-style clips to mount. They’re not the most durable, but they are quick and easy to use and ensure that you can install the cooler without the use of a backplate, meaning quick and easy installations.
At the top, a Cooler Master logo is stamped into the top fin, giving a nice bit of subtle branding.
On the base, you can see the heat pipes are quite spread out, but the block between them will help better distribute the heat throughout them. The brackets are pre-installed, but as you can see, they can be unscrewed and reattached to suit the appropriate socket size.
We normally jump to an extra page for installation here, but since this uses those simple direct-to-motherboard clips, it’s just a case of pushing the four pins down and it locks into place. The whole process, including applying thermal paste, took just a few seconds. As you can see, the slim cooler design means that the fan is set back from the memory modules, meaning you won’t suffer from conflicts and even if you did (you won’t), you could easily move the fan to the other side of the cooler anyway.
