Cooler Master Seidon 120M and Hyper T4 Mini-Review

Today we take a quick look at two inexpensive aftermarket CPU coolers from Cooler Master – a regular heatpipe tower heatsink that is the Hyper T4 and a closed-loop water cooling kit called the Seidon 120M. How well do they perform?

Similar to the famous Hyper 212 series that have been the choice of enthusiasts for years. the Cooler Master Hyper T4 is a slim aluminum tower heatsink with four direct touch copper heatpipes at its base. Equipped with a 120mm PWM fan rated at 1800rpm / 70CFM / 31.6dBA, it is an inexpensive way (SGD$59) to upgrade the stock heatsink solution for almost every modern Intel/AMD CPU socket type.

The relatively slim profile of the Hyper T4 allows it to be installed onto motherboards or enclosures with tight space constraints. Also, the position of fan can be adjusted vertically to accomodate tall RAM heatspreaders. Brackets to install another 120mm fan are included in the package as well.

Installation is fairly quick and painless with the use of thumbscrews and clips for every step. Mounting pressure isn't as tight as the more advanced towers that we've come across but it does its job fairly well for its price.

Our test setup is the top of the line Intel i7-3960X (rated at 130w TDP) mounted on an Asus Rampage IV GENE. When pushed hard with a "power virus" like Linpack, the heat output can be as much as 180w according to the on-die power reading. The Hyper T4 reached a maximum load temperature of 62 degree celcius, which is way below the thermal throttling limit and a good result as regular applications and games will be way below that figure. Further tests showed that we can push the Vcore safely up to 1.4v, which should allow for overclocks around 4.4 GHz on our Sandy Bridge-E system. This cooler should also be able to handle mainstream Ivy Bridge and Trinity CPUs near the fabled 5 GHz frequency range, which have a much lower heat output than the 6-core processor that we used.