Reeven Justice (RC-1204) CPU Cooler Review

Introduction

Reeven are still a fairly new company based in Asia that focus on cooling products and also fan controllers. It’s hard to find any Reeven products in the UK as they don’t seem to have any resellers over here, which is a real shame. The products really do look very nice and I think there is certainly a place for them here. It’s been a while since we have had any products from Reeven, almost 2 years, so it’s great to finally get some more to put on our bench and see how the company is evolving and expanding. We have been sent 3 of the latest coolers to come from them and we are going to look at the first one, the Reeven Justice, today.

The Justice is a mid-tier single tower CPU cooler made for 120mm fans. As you can see from the box the actual unit looks very nice, there are 6 heat pipes to take away the heat from the CPU to the tower and you also can get a sneak peak of the fan attachment clips which we will take a closer look at later. Also on the box you can see that the Reeven Justice will fit all of the popular Intel and AMD sockets.

Inside the box, which incidentally is very well packaged, we get this beauty of a cooler. The 120mm black and yellow fan is pre-attached and there is no need to remove it during installation so it is pretty much ready to go straight from the box.

Also in the box we have everything that is needed to attach the cooler to the motherboard and an instruction manual to help you along. There are also 4 more yellow clips, these are to allow you to add a second 120mm fan to the cooler using the nifty little attachment system if you wish. The clips just fit into the holes where the screws would normally go, then simply push onto the cooling tower. As well as all the fittings they actually give you a small spanner too. Now this is something you will need if you don’t have access to a long screwdriver, which will become more apparent shortly.

Here you can see the clips that I mention above a little better, such a simple idea and they work very well. As you can see, the fans are black with yellow blades and details, this is something that we see a lot with Reeven. They have obviously chosen these colours as their brand colours and stuck with them. They do look very nice, however they will struggle to fit many colour schemes which could put people off buying them. The fans have a max RPM of 1500 and a max static pressure of 0.067inchH2O.

Going back to the cooler we can see that there are six heat pipes leading away from the CPU contact plate. This should help disperse the heat more effectively as it allows it to travel away from the CPU and into the tower where it can be moved on by the fan. Again, the contact plate really does have a quality finish and looks superb.

Speaking of it looking superb, this is just eye pure eye candy. It’s not often that a cooler makes me think “wow” but with the Reeven products they have this amazing brushed aluminium finish which just looks amazing. It just oozes quality. Even the branding fits in with the design, which is something that isn’t always easy to do.

Fitting the cooler wasn’t as easy as I had hoped. It wasn’t hard by any stretch of the imagination, but there were certainly areas that could be improved. For instance, I use a long 15cm screwdriver which fits into my trusty ratchet driver which gives it an extra 6 or 7cm. Even with this I wasn’t able to screw the cooler down properly as my ratchet driver is a little too thick to get into the holes that are provided, I had to use the spanner which is provided instead. This did make things a little trickier as you can only do quarter turns with the spanner. This is something that shouldn’t be a problem at all. There are 2 ways to solve it instantly, first, they could lower the overall profile of the cooler, as it stands, it is quite tall. Even easier, they could make the holes a little wider. The main issue was that the larger part of my screwdriver (which is a standard ratchet driver that I see used regularly when building computers) was simply too wide for the small holes that are available to use; as said though, this isn’t a deal breaker. They do give you the tools to let you combat the issue and when it is fitted it does look superb.

As you can see, low profile RAM has to be used if you want the fan on the same side as the fan. This could cause issues if you are using RAM such as Corsair Dominator or similar. It’s also the same story if you were to buy a second 120mm fan for this cooler, you would be limited to low profile ram. This is always something you should consider when buying a CPU cooler. On most boards, only using 1 fan is perfectly fine with any RAM as you can just put the fan on the opposite side of your ram slots. In this picture you can also see my last little problem with this cooler, the gap between the fan and the tower. Due to the tool-less fan clips there is a rather large gap. This could mean that the air is escaping around the sides of the tower rather than going through the fins and doing its job. This could cause problems when testing, but we will see how it handles that later.