Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus CPU Cooler Review

Dual Fan Performance

Since this is one of the few coolers on the market to come with sufficient fan clips to run a pair of 120mm fans, we decided to make good use of this little extra accessory. Since the extra clips are provided, we think lot of people will want to run dual fans on this unit so we elected to use two Noctua NF-P12-1300 fans for this test.


These numbers are very, VERY good and we are now seeing the true potential of this amazing cooler. While dual fan setups are not for everyone and they add to the price of the unit, you have to realise that with both P12’s running flat out the noise level was actually less than when we were running the single stock fan. If you can afford to replace the lone fan with duals and don’t mind INCREASED noise we can just imagine what levels of performance you could reach with dual Panflos.. As it stands we are very impressed with this cooler as should you be.

Passive Cooling

In certain extreme cases you may have to deal with a dead fan; or alternatively you are interested in using a certain cooler as a passive cooler. While we are hesitant to recommend any Air cooler for passive cooling, unless the manufacturer has designed it to be one, we all know things break and there is a possibility of ending up with a passively cooled device even if you neither meant nor wanted it to be so! To this end we have devised the following torture test to see how a given cooler will perform in a worst case scenario.

The following test will be PASS/FAIL unless a manufacture specifically states a CPU cooling solution is designed for passive cooling as we feel that do to otherwise would be very disingenuous and down right unfair. If it is designed for passive use we will of course provide hard data on its performance. We believe this is a fair and reasonable compromise between providing you our reader the most information possible, while still being fair and unbiased to the manufacturers.

Anyone can create a test which has no possibility of success but that would be a waste of any ones time; this test on the other hand is as tough as we can make it and still have to possibility of success. What makes this test so difficult, is the simple reason that we will be testing in an open bench which has absolutely no external air flow. Even in the most under-cooled cases there is always some air movement, even if the air movement is only coming from the PSU it is still a heck of a lot more than will be afforded a cooler on our open bench. As we stated earlier this is a worst case, scenario where the cooler will have to shed all the heat it can by simple passive radiation!

The first and main part of the test is 15 minutes of prime95 small fft being run at stock speed (2.4GHz) on our i7 test system. If at anytime the temperature of any of the four cores reaches and stays at 70° C for greater than 10 seconds we will consider this test a FAIL.

Please note: Any Air based CPU cooler which passes the i7 test will automatically be given a PASS grade on the cooler running secondary passive CPU test. To keep things easier to understand the only time we will publish the Q6600 subtest is when a given cooler has failed the main i7 test.


The 212 Plus passed this test with flying colors. If your case has good airflow and a cooler running processor, this may make a good and SILENT addition to your system. For everyon else, knowing you have some wiggle room if you DO lose a fan is a nice security blanket to have.