Heatsink Construction & Design
Heatsink Construction & Design
When you first lay eyes on the Cooler Master V8, a few obvious design traits tend to jump out at you; the first of which is the fan placement. Unlike most coolers, the fan on the V8 is not on either end but instead sandwiched in the middle with cooling towers on either side of it. When you take a closer look, details like like the fact that there are more than two cooling towers come into focus as well. In fact, the two smaller towers (the two outer most) are not even in an up and down orientation; they are actually on their sides.
When you remove the fan and the filler which goes with it, the basic design concept does become a lot clearer. In a nutshell this cooler is all about being a modular and relatively cutting edge design. While it may not exactly be ideal to have a centrally based tower, the design of the V8 is certainly unique and may work quite well. The 4 large main heatpipes each have a cooling tower per side of the main U with four more smaller half height (aka half U…etc) heatpipes outside and with their own tower is unique to the V line.
For those not familiar with this cooler or its larger V10 brother, you have four large heatpipes with two of these located in the center of the base and then one on each end. In between the large outer heatpipes, are four short heapipes (two on the “left side” of the center large heatpipes and then two on the right side of the center heatpipes). These smaller heatpipes are staggered with one going to the left external cooling tower and the other going to the right for each pair (and thus side of the center U pipes). Rinse and repeat for the other side of the main pair of U heatpipes and you end up with one busy yet oh so full base, with TONS of cooling potential.
If you are keeping track, this gives us the grand total of 8 pipes where the name comes from….but in reality there is only the equivalent of 6 (and spare change) U heatpipes OR if you count heatpipes sprouting from each side of the base there is 6 per side for a total of 12 pipes.
As for the specifications of this cooler it is a multi-tower affair which weighs in at 1.91 pounds (866.3 grams), and is 120mm x 120mm x 158mm in size. In other words this is not a small cooler in any direction, nor is it exactly on the light end of the weight spectrum. Though to be fair, you can easily tell this is the little brother of the monstrously huge V10. We guess they both ate a lot of ‘roids with their milk and Wheaties as kids.
We are not sure why Cooler Master chose to have each cooling tower only have two heatpipes. It certainly would have been more efficient to have had all four per side sticking up and into one larger cooling fin array per side. As it stands, the two outer (smaller heatpipes towers) are centered directly over the dead zone (i.e. directly in front of its HUB) and the added bulk and depth of field of all these fins only increase the static pressure of the air moving in and out of the V8. Heck, the outer tower fins not only make the sides twice as wide as they need to be but they are also are pointed in a completely different orientation. This will cause the air moving over them to swirl and thus not want to flow in and out in a direct path in a efficient, low static pressure movement.
To us, sticking a fan in the center of the heatsinks would be a great idea….IF they had allowed mounting fans on either end of the cooler. This would have been a great setup, as the center fan could help reduce the static pressure load of the two end fans and further increase the thermal efficiency of the cooling towers. As it stands, terms like “sucking mud through a straw” come to mind, so this better be one heck of a good fan as it not only has to work to push the air out through all those fins but also suck in air through densely packed fins as well. We highly doubt any 25mm thick fan will excel in this situation and this is one area where the specs should have called for a 38mm thick fan….say a Panaflo.
Further worsening things is the main towers' fin design. We don’t want to belabour the fact that the “modular” setup has for all intents and purposes cross thatched the fin arrays making a bad situation potentially worse; so let’s ignore that for the moment and concentrate on the face of the fins them sleeves. As with the outer side of the fins the inner face (the side facing the fan) is not multi-faceted; rather it has a slight curve to it but not by much. This too will add to the static pressure of the air which has to force its way past two cooling tower fin arrays and then slam head on into what is for all intents and purposes an aluminum wall. If Cooler Master did not want to stipple, or shape the faces of this cooler better than they have, they could have easily made the towers further apart and added in a small fan shroud to each side of the fan (say 10-15mm each side). This would have not only helped eliminate the dead zone caused by the fan hub but would also help the air to more easily enter the flat face of the exhaust towers. This is a classic water cooling trick which really is perfectly suited for this situation.
On the positive side and moving onto the base of this cooler, we come to what is easily one of the best polished bases we have seen in awhile. Terms like: “mirror bright” come to mind when we look at how well polished it is. Needless to say, not only is this base perfectly flat, it lacks any large tooling marks and only has small polishing marks. It is certainly above average, and was a true shining example of what can and should be done! Now if only they wouldn’t stick those awful glue labels on the bottom and we would have been truly happy.
All in all this is a big cooler, and all that mass will help it in keeping your CPU happy, we would be a huge supporter of it. However, we do have some major reservations about the basic design of the V8. We have been wrong before, but it doesn’t look or feel like we are going to be this time. Lets just hope Cooler Master went with one seriously kick ass heavy duty fan. Did they? Let's find out on the next page.
