Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus CPU Cooler Review

Installation Con't

To show you exactly how much room this cooler requires we have taken photos and notes of it installed in both a North/South and East/West orientations. Here is what we found out.

North / South Cooler Orientation

In the alternate North South orientation, the fans are pointing up and down in relation to a standard ATX setup. This orientation does have some major benefits IF you have a case which is side and top fan heavy (such as the HAF 932). One fan sucking the heat out the back versus three….sounds like a no brainer right? Well not in all instances since it really does depend on the motherboard you are using and the clearance to its heat sinks, the ram and other crucial parts which really shouldn’t come into contact with the cooler. In the instance of the Hyper 212 PLUS, this is what we found.

Please note:
The heatsink on our Gigabyte X58-UD3R which closest to the PCI-E slots stands about 32mm tall, the heatsink closest to the I/O panel stands about 34mm tall and the small silver one stands about 28mm tall.


With most coolers in this orientation the RAM and chipset heatsink are the critical factors to a successful mount. As you can see, we have taken the worst case scenario and installed TWO fans. When it comes to ram clearance you should have no problems what so ever even with higher memory heatsinks as we had loads of room. The same cannot be said about the heatsink on the other side and if the ones on your board are taller than ours you may run afoul not of the 212 PLUS itself or even the fan's wire brackets. Even pushing the fan up as far it can go still meant it rubbed the top of the heatsink. We don’t consider this a huge deal BUT this can be considered the absolute MAXIMUM height restriction for this cooler.


As you can see, even with two fans attached this cooler has tons of room and if your motherboard uses the standard clearance around the i7 mounting area you should have no concerns or worries. All in all you really only have to worry about one contact point when mounting in a N/S orientation. Additionally, we don’t think it would be too hard to mod the offending wire clips so they don’t stick out if you motherboard uses taller heatsinks. In our books, this not to shabby for a dual fan wielding cooler.

East / West Orientation

The East/West orientation (AKA front to back) is the typical cooler orientation found in most setups. This is because while not all cases have top exhaust fans, darn near every one we have heard of (except for the occasion exotic passive case) has a rear exhaust port. Thus, it makes perfect sense to have the hot air pushed towards this fan so it can be quickly and efficiently sucked out of the case. As with the N/S orientation, we installed this cooler with both fans attached.


As you can see, the 212 PLUS may be close to the heatsink but there is still loads of room. If you use thicker fans things may not go as smoothly. As our motherboard has a fairly small heatsink over the VRM area, we are not surprised that there were no worries here either. If your motherboard packs big and exotic heatsinks over the VRMs, you may run into issues but then again you are probably already aware of the limitations imposed upon coolers by your motherboard.


As with the N/S orientation you have lots of room between the cooler and the ram so even users with the tallest of RAM need not worry. Interestingly enough and unlike the N/S orientation you need not worry about the motherboard heatsink as it should be far enough away from the cooler as to not be a worry. This of course goes along with the caveat that we mentioned before in that if your motherboard has extra wide or exotically shaped heatsinks you may be in trouble.

All in all, we ran into no issues worth mentioning with the East / West orientation. To further help you we can say this cooler we fully rigged with dual fans is 120mm wide, 102mm long and 158.5mm high. The fin array starts fairly high up at 37mm above the base.

While this does not sound like much clearance this does not include your typical height of about 8mm for the CPU socket. If you are not using a Gigabyte X58-UD3R motherboard you should be able to size things up first with these numbers and see if it will fit.