Cooler Master V10 CPU Cooler Review

Heatsink Construction & Design

If there is one thing that will first strike you about the V10 it is how awe-inspiringly huge it is. As you will see in the Installation section, it is made in such a way that its back "arm" stretches over your memory modules while the overall height is close to that of a TRUE. It is all topped off by a beautiful black shroud which serves to direct the airflow from the two fans.

Overall, the V10 is a massive 236mm (9.32 inches) long by 129.6 (5.11 inches) wide by 161.3mm (6.36 iches) tall. To put it bluntly this bad boy is frickin’ huge! Pictures barely do it justice and you really need to hold this beast in your two hands to get a feel for it.


When you do remove the plastic cover and take a close look at the insides, one thing becomes abundantly clear: this cooler unlike darn near any other air based CPU cooling solution we have looked at is actually three coolers in one.


As you can now easily see the area where the vertically mounted fan resides, for all intents and purposes, delineates two separate cooling towers from one another. The third, is more obvious as it hangs off to the side and acts like an overly large downdraft cooler.

Unlike other large heatsinks which were monolithic in their approach to cooling, this segmented approach does have its own unique set of pros and cons. The down side is the overall surface area available to all the heatpipes is a lot less than it would be if the cooling fins were all “attached” ( a good example of the monolithic approach is the Scythe Copper Ninja which we reviewed earlier). This could result in excess heat which cannot be dissipated and will in turn mean an overall increase in CPU temperatures. However, where this is a hybrid cooler the biggest benefit to segmentation is each sections heatpipes are cooled by their “own” heatsink so any heat which has to be dumped from the built-in TEC (which is located off to the side of the base) will not effect the performance of the other heatpipes. Keep this in mind as we go through the rest of the design as it may be the secret to the V10's success.


If you take a close look you will see this unit is in fact a 6 heatpipe cooling unit of which four are used the cool said TEC unit. Of these six heatpipes the outer two do not have an end which terminates under the Peltier unit. This is most likely done so as to allow this unit to be as compatible with as wide range (and size) of CPUs as possible. To be more precise the four center pipes will be covered regardless of what CPU you intend to cool with the V10. This in turn will help keep any possible dangers of sweating / condensation from occurring due to the fact you would have two heatpipes which would be ultra cold with no BTUs available to keep them above ambient temperatures.


To further help balance temperature loads the four which do “start” under the TEC are split across both of the non TEC cooling towers. This ensures that all six heatpipes (not just those special 4) are properly load balanced as neither tower should in theory be cooler or hotter than the other. Both use fresh air to cool themselves with and both have a similar amount of surface area per heatpipe.


The extra four heatpipes which help give this cooler its name are in reality only two heatpipes. We are not sure why Cooler Master counts these two long heatpipes as four pipes but only counts the other 6 long pipes as six heatpipes. We assume this is to help distinguish it from the V8 and V12. After all, this V10 may “only” have 8 heatpipes but it is in a class all to itself when compared to the more mundane non TEC based V8. Confusing nomenclature or no, this bad boy really only has 8 long heatpipes and a bad ass TEC.