Gelid Solutions GX-7 CPU Cooler Review

The Gelid GX-7 costs a mere £33 in the United Kingdom. When you consider you are getting a LED 120mm fan, a very nice heatsink and a healthy 7 heat pipes, it dawns on you just how well priced this cooler is. The Respire T40 which costs about 10% more actually only has 4 heat pipes. I expect if you were to add a second fan to the GX-7 then performance would scale much better than some of its competitors due to how much cooling potential this cooler has.

The Gelid Solutions GX-7 does possess a few drawbacks that are necessary to consider. Firstly, the fan clips are incredibly tricky to use and mount – this can be very frustrating even at the best of times but once fitted they are secure and do the job they are meant to. Secondly, the Gelid GX-7 obstructs the first RAM slot on an LGA 1155 socket motherboard so you will not be able to use four high profile RAM modules in your system – only a pair in slots 2 and 4. Finally, the mounting kit is not exactly my favourite. I have tried and tested many other coolers and I have got to say this is one of the more tricky and time consuming mounting kits on the market.

We really liked the Gelid Solutions GX-7 as it offers a good deal of performance for your money. The acoustic performance is really good too and the aesthetics of the product are very robust and suitable for a lot of gamer cases on the market. In fact it is sensible to look at this as a cheaper and slightly worse performing alternative to the Sapphire Vapor-X CPU cooler which costs £50, so if you consider this costs nearly half the price and only sacrifices 4 degrees in performance then it is actually really good. Gelid also deserve praise for including an additional set of fan clips and bundling some genuinely-high-performance GC2 thermal paste, most other manufacturers opt for a small amount of a really quite rubbish unbranded thermal paste.

The fact the Gelid GX-7 blocks a RAM slot is quite a major drawback especially with this product being aimed at gaming systems that are likely to have high profile RAM, like the Corsair Vengeance kits. The trickiness and time consuming nature of the mounting kit is another issue that means this product falls short of the eTeknix Editor’s Choice award. However, one thing that is indisputable is that this cooler packs a good amount of performance for a low price. Kudos to Gelid Solutions for creating such a wallet friendly product, hence we would like to award the Gelid GX-7 CPU Cooler with the eTeknix Bang for Buck award.