Cooler Master Hyper TX 2

Verdict: An efficient, quiet and ludicrously cheap CPU cooler.

Only one HSF design seems to have really succeeded in the sub-£20 market: combining aluminium fins, U-shaped copper heatpipes and a fan. Essentially, the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro blueprint.

With the Hyper TX 2, Cooler Master has augmented the basic design of the Freezer 7 Pro by fitting a plastic guard to the back of the cooler in order to angle some of the airflow down to the motherboard VRMs. The slow-spinning 92mm is also a fixed-speed model, rated at 22dBA, as opposed to a variable-speed PWM fan.

There used to be two versions of the Hyper TX 2 - one for AMD and one for Intel - but with this revision, both mounting mechanisms are provided in the same box. Cooler Master has stuck with the traditional four push-pins for LGA775, and two clips and a lever for Socket AM2, so there's no need to remove your motherboard from its tray before fitting the Hyper TX2 for either socket type.

The copper base of the Hyper TX2 is coated with hard thermal paste, which melts and spreads when in contact with a hot CPU. This happened quickly, and the cooler outperformed the reference Intel HSF by 4ûC. It was also much quieter than the reference HSF when cooling our overclocked and overvolted quad-core Intel Xeon X3210 CPU.

Conclusion

There's very little to criticise with this HSF, as the Hyper TX 2 costs just over £10, and is an effective and quiet cooler. That said, we're duty-bound to point out that the £16 Freezer 7 Pro outperforms it by 4ûC, but is noisier. The slightly higher price of the Freezer 7 Pro is justified if temperatures are your priority.