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Cooler Master HCC-002 cooler review

1st Impression’s:

These new retail product’s from Cooler Master are very nice, and beutyfull, they come neatly packed in a plastic box, with lot’s of publicity to the cooler and the company, this model the HCC-002 is an all copper cooler, with 26 fins, that are soldered into the base, it has a tick base of 5mm, wich is nicely finished, but still there are some manufacturing marks, it’s an medium sized cooler. In it’s box comes a sticker saying "Designed 4 Overclocking" and that’s exactly how im going to test it, in an overclocked mode, so im hopeing that it will do good, but that will shall see... One thing about this cooler that I like is it’s "spring clip", because it’s very easy to clip, you just push with the fingers and that’s all ! One think that Cooler Master was concerned about was oxidation on it’s coolers, so the cooler came with a "silica gel" compound to absorb any humidity that could exist in the places that the cooler would be, so that when the user bought it, it would still be shiny, looking brand new as it is espected ! One thing I wasn’t expecting was a cooler of this kind, to be accopanied by such a low profile thermal compound as silicone, but this was, I was especting to see Cooler Master’s coolers being shiped with one of their two thermal coumponds: Premium (copper based coumpond) or High Performance (silver based coumpond), so I was a little disapointed in this. Another good point is that the fan comes equiped with a finger guard grid, that also add’s some stile to the cooler itself.

Now let’s go over to the Technical Specs.

Technical Specs:

Heat Sink Material: Copper

Heat Sink dimensions: 6*6*3cm

Heat Sink Thermal Resistance: there isn’t an accurate way to know, since it depends on the fan being used with the heat sink, if it has more air flow: the thermal resistance will drop, if it has less air flow: the thermal resistance will rise. And as the cooler’s might be bought with diferent fan’s than the one’s we use here I won’t be using the thermal resistence as a mean for comparing or getting any conclusion about the quality of a cooler and it’s performance compared to others !

Fan Brand: Cooler Master

Fan Dimensions: 60*60*25mm

Fan Voltage: 12v

Fan Speed: 6800RPM

Fan Air Flow: aproximatly 38CFM

Fan Noise: pretty noisy unfortunatly ! L

The Test

The test will be done with the following components:

Motherboard: Soltek SL75 DRV2 (with integrated cpu heat reading)

CPU: AMD Duron 650MHz overclocked to 866MHz running with extra vcore, all this so that it will produce more heat !

Thermal Paste: Silver based.

The rest: A mid tower with no extra fans, just one on the psu getting the air out, fully closed, with 2 hard drives, 1agp video card, 2pci cards, 2 cd-rom drives, plenty of cables (no round cables), this system is to try and get the most close as possible to a normal every day user system and not a fully overclockers aluminium case, filled with fans, round cables, holes and etc... So that your test results can be compared to the most users possible ! And not just by overclockers. Because here the real thing being tested is the heatsink and not the rest of the cooling stuff you might have on your case and that might be afecting your overall cooling performance ! Alias this is one of the rulles I use when testing the material, to make the system in wich I test the heatsink the most similar possible to the most users, that don’t have anything else in their computer boxes to improve the cooling of their cpu and overall system besides the fan on the psu and the cpu cooler, some other rulles are: we use the same tipe of fans for all the coolers reviewd here ! And that’s because some other sites make coolers roundups in wich cooler is tested with a fan with diferent air flow, and then they post a page with the different coolers all compared by their thermal resistence, wich of course will be different if they had used all the fans with the same air flow, as I here intend to test the quality of the heatsink for itself and not to fool the reader, I will be using fans with the same air flow ! All heatsinks, being 60mm or 80mm fan cooled will have fans in their test rated to output 38CFM ! So that the results can be compared among themselfs without fooling anyone, with this idea I have managed to compare only the quality of the heatsink for themselfs without any type of secondary artifact, since I will be using the same computer and fan system every time I review a cooler ! As I don’t use the thermal resistance of a cooler for getting my results, I will base them on two temperatures, and used them when I compare coolers, and Idle temperature, taken after the pc starts to work, but doesn’t really does nothing, and a full load temperature, obtained after running an hour and a half of the following softwares all at the same time: Prime95, SETI@Home, MusicMatch Jukebox playing a never ending playlist of mp3 and oppening several web pages, and gaming ! Do you think this is enough ?! hehehe ;)

Well now after having boored you to death, with all this testing stuff let’s see the results and conclusion’s ! :) (Bet you’re thinking: "finaly thank God !" lol)

Results and Conclusion:

Well after having tested this cooler this are the results, here are the temps:

Idle: 39ºC

Full Load: 42ºC

Well this is a nice cooler, a nice performer, but it still could be best, the good points about this cooler are: an easy spring clip, the fact that it’s an all cooper cooler, and it’s price, because this is a cheap cooler, the bad things are: the noise that the fan does, and maybe the fact that the cooler could perform even better if the fins and the base would be cut from a single cooper pice, and also if the base had a "mirror finishing".