Cooler Master Hyper T4 - A Step Up In Budget Cooling

Launched at the same time as the Blizzard T2, the Hyper T4 is the latest addition to Cooler Master’s well-known Hyper series. Like the Blizzard T2, it’s aimed at the budget end of the market, but it’s altogether much larger. The size is down to the fact that it uses four heat pipes and supports Intel’s socket 2011 and 1366, as well as the usual 1156, 1155 and 775 sockets and AMD’s FM1, AM3+, AM3 and AM2.

Cooler Master Hyper T4

The Hyper T4 looks just like any other four-heat-pipe-equipped tower cooler, albeit with a somewhat tall and thin aluminium cooling matrix. It’s a direct contact cooler, which means that the pipes are flattened at the base of the cooler where they pass through the contact plate, so they make direct contact with the top of CPU heat spreader.

The T4 comes with a single 120mm cooling fan. It’s PWM controlled, spins between 600 and 1,080rpm and can be fine-tuned between maximum cooling or quiet operation. It uses snap-on mounts, so it’s easy to remove for cleaning or replacing, and comes bundled with a second pair of mounts for a second fan (not included).

Mounting the Hyper T4 starts in a conventional way for a cooler these days: the motherboard has to be removed if your chassis doesn’t have the necessary cutaway. Four tool-free locking posts lock the plate to the board and then four thumbscrew locking nuts hold the two mounting plates to these posts. Then things get a little strange as the device that locks the CPU into place looks rather like a standard AMD CPU locking mechanism. It’s the first time we’ve seen an Intel cooler using something like this but it works well.

The new Cooler Master Hyper T4 is perfect for just about any newer or older motherboards

One thing to note is that if you have a motherboard with heatsinks crowding around the CPU socket, you might find space is a bit tight to attach this locking bar to the lugs on the mounting. We found this out to our cost with our testing motherboard: the bar only just had enough space and the fact it did was more luck than judgment.

Ideally the cooler should be good enough to cool the chip to about 20^oC or so below the TJMax. Well, that went straight out of the window when the i7 3770K was overclocked to 4.5GHz. at idle it was some 4^o cooler than the Blizzard T2 at 26^oC, but as soon as we maxed out the CPU to 100 per cent, once again, in less than a minute, the temperature of the cores climbed past the 100^oC mark and kept climbing, just like its smaller sibling.

It’s somewhat surprising that with its four heat pipe cooling and larger cooling matrix and fan, the Hyper T4 was no more successful at keeping the overclocked 3770K cool at 100 per cent than its much weedier sibling, the Blizzard T2. But, as we said before, the Hyper T4 has been designed with a budget price point in mind and, thanks to its larger, slower fan, it is quieter in use. The T4 also supports Intel’s larger socket 2011 and 1366 processors, although if you have a system using any of these chips your budget must be pretty substantial already. A cheap fan, then, is probably the last thing on your mind.

Technical analysis

Compared to the Blizzard T2 the T4 is much better at the basic cooling at stock levels, but it’s still not going to help you crank up the clocks. That said it’s a budget cooler that will function happily at standard speeds and it will do it all quietly too.

Vital Statistics ·         Price: $32 ·         Manufacturer: Cooler Master ·         Website: www.coolermaster.co.uk ·         Cooling type: Air, active ·         Fans 1 x 120mm PWM ·         Socket support LGA2011, LGA1366, LGA1156, LGA1155, LGA775, AMD FM1, AM3+, AM3, AM2 ·         Radiator construction: Aluminium ·         Max noise: 31.6dBA ·         Dimensions 132 x 72 x 152mm ·         Weight: 448g Verdict Features: 6/10 Performance: 6/10 ·         Value: 8/10