Cryorig H7 Tower Cooler

This CPU cooler is great. If you're considering the Hyper 212 EVO, this cooler improves upon almost every shortcoming of the 212, which itself is a great cooler despite them. First of all and most importantly, the temperatures are some of the best you'll ever get from air cooling. The fan is nearly silent and the honeycomb heatsink does a superb job of dissipating heat. Next, and almost everyone's major complaint about the 212, the CRYORIG H7 shifts the entire heatsink block away from your RAM DIMMs by about an inch, give or take. As a result, you won't have to touch the fan to get it to fit over any RAM heatsink. As the fan stops short of overlapping the first DIMM, you can use RAM with any size heatsink and have no issue whatsoever with clearance. Finally, the aesthetics are a level above similar coolers. The black matte material on the top looks great with any build and the white fan is vibrant in a case with a window, especially with any kind of lighting. Installation is pretty simple although I recommend you install it on your CPU before you screw your motherboard into its case. I installed it after and it was a bit of a challenge without an extra set of hands.Overall, I'm extremely pleased I cancelled an order for another 212 when I learned of the CRYORIG H7. Temps are equal if not marginally better than the 212 and the value for money is unbeatable. Great build quality, great aesthetics, great compatability, a huge tube of thermal paste, and admirable performance for casual to mid level overclocking. What more could you want?

Edit 2: Star restored. I can't hold a wild, random defect against Cryorig. At idle speeds, temperatures were outstanding. It was just under load that things got out of hand. Because they clearly make a great product and everything else about the cooler was perfect, I'm putting that fifth star back.Edit: Have to remove a star. While using my H7, I noticed that my temperatures were creeping back up, so I pulled the cooler off the CPU to make sure the MX-4 thermal paste hadn't failed, and what I saw can only be described as the Red Sea: the center of the CPU (where the cores are) was almost bare, with the paste having collected on the sides. I cleaned and reapplied the MX-4, this time using the pea method instead of the line, and within a day had the same results: naked cores and paste halo'ed around the perimeter of the CPU. I tried again with Arctic Silver 5, which I've seen spread a little better than MX-4...same thing happened. Finally, it occurred to me that maybe I should just use the included CP7 paste, because it was designed for this thing, right?Same problem. It halo'ed. I was stumped, and it was only after talking with a couple of Micro Center employees that the light bulb clicked on: the only thing that would cause that type of spread pattern is a warped heat spreader. I cleaned off all the paste and (don't try this at home, kids) slowly ran my bare thumb across the spreader. It's incredibly slight, but it's there--the spreader isn't perfectly smooth. It angles ever so slightly, just enough that it could theoretically cause irregular spreading of thermal paste like what I saw. I'm not going to hammer Cryorig too hard for this because I've never heard a single complaint about the H7 and some random defects are completely unpreventable, but I do have to take one star off for a QA issue that's left me with a defective, underperforming heatsink.Original review is below:Epic win. Cinebench stress test load temps went from 78-80C on my old 92mm cooler to 63C max on the H7. I'm running an i7-4790K, stock speed and voltage for now. RealBench stress tests never went above 66C over an eight-hour test. Furmark's CPU Burner couldn't get it over 68C, Intel XTU didn't do any better, and even Prime95 (which is a really bad thing to do to a Haswell, so I only went 15 minutes) peaked at 70C. Best of all, this thing is silent in operation. I can't hear it over my case fans, even when two of those case fans are disabled entirely.Installation is a bit tricky, as you need access to both sides of your motherboard at once, so I don't recommend the pea method of applying thermal paste as that might result in an uneven spread. Instead, I'd do a very thin line, top to bottom, down the center of the CPU. Don't waste your time and paste on funky little X patterns or a bunch of dots, and definitely don't spread the paste with a credit card or anything silly like that.I have a TON of headroom to overclock with this, and the thermal paste hasn't even burned in yet. Speaking of thermal paste, I didn't use the included Cryorig CP7 paste with it. I went with Arctic MX-4 instead, a paste that I know well and know works. I've never used CP7 and honestly can't say how it would have performed, but generally speaking, the difference between the top-tier thermal pastes and everything else is only 1-3 degrees Celsius. If you're one of those folks using custom water loops to get your CPU to a bazillion GHz by running a million jigawatts across the core, you need every last degree, but the CP7 should more than suffice for 90+% of PC users.Oh, and the heatsink looks great.

So I'm a bit of an amateur when it comes to installing and changing out hardware in my desktop. I usually have to watch a video - or several of them - to figure out how to do it.To save anyone else like me some of the trouble I went through, here are some tips:1. The current back plate in your desktop has to fully come out for the x bar plate to fit. It should fit flawlessly. I however couldn't figure out for a while why it wouldnt fit right.2. The x bar works fine to fit whatever the screw holder pattern on your board. You just have to squeeze the x bar VERY hard to get it to bend right. Took me an hour to figure this out.3. You can position the fan base to and adjust the fan unit itself to blow through the back or front. From what I read online, the back is usually what people suggest.4. The back of tour actual processor unit is likely where you'll have to apply the thermal paste. Wiggle it and eventually it will come off. When you pull off your old fan to replace it with this new one, your processor might come off with it. If this happens, be VERY careful reattaching your processor to its base. Make sure all those gold little needle prongs align as well as ensuring the sides correspond right before you latch it back on. Triple check it.I made the mistake of not doing this the first time I took my old fan unit off to clean it and then attempted to reattach the processor when it came off with it. I almost bent/broke some of the prongs and it took me forever to straighten each one back out with a small plastic card. Replacing your processor is expensive. Be careful.5. This fan unit feels a bit heavy, but the x-bar they give you helps support it well so don't worry about unnecessary strain.This fan cools very well. The room I have my desktop gets very hot during the summers and it's hard to keep it cool. Not only is this fan quiet, it actually cooled the case down. (Note I have a large cooler master case.)