CM's V10 CPU Cooler - The Best Thing Since Sliced Cheese

Written by: Berry van der Linden • Edited by: J. F. Amprimoz
Updated Jun 6, 2009 • Related Guides: Amazon | Cooler Master | CPU

I was skeptical when I first got the V10 CPU Cooler. But man this is an awesome piece of hardware. Read the review to find out why.

I have seen a lot of CPU coolers in my career. Some of them work; some of them don't. That's how my approach was towards the V10. I thought it's probably a CPU cooler that will be somewhat better then the stock CPU cooler. A few degrees difference and that's it. But wow, this piece of premium hardware blew me away.

Installed In Case

How Did You Test It?

This V10 CPU cooler was tested in a “real world” environment. This means that I took one of my boxes (specs here, the desktop) took the stock cooler off and replaced it with the V10 CPU cooler. This box is mostly used for home computing: We watch TV and IPTV on it. We game on it. Before replacing the stock cooling I generated a log of the temperatures with the stock fan. This was also done after replacing the it with the V10 CPU cooler. These two logs where then compared to come up with the data used for this review. Temperatures where taken with the box in idle state and and with full CPU usage.

After taking the V10 CPU cooler out I had a water cooling system to review so I took some preliminary data to compare V10 data against it.

In a separate article still to be written (the link will appear here after it's done) I will describe the IR thermometers and other equipement used to get to the results measured. Please watch for this article next month.

The Stock CPU Cooler Results

As said above I measured the temperatures under load and in idle state. I must say the airflow in this Cooler Master Cosmos case is excellent so the temperatures are really low already. Here is the average of the temperatures.

Ambient room Temp. 75F (24C)

Core0

Under Load: 30C

Idle: 23C

Core1

Under Load: 20C

Idle: 13C

The Tech. Behind The V10 CPU Cooler
Rating

The V10 CPU cooler is so great because it has a TEC (Thermal Electric Cooler), also called a Peltier element. A Peltier element has a hot and a cold side, and uses thermoelectric properties to move heat from the hot to the cold side. It is pretty cool tech, if you will pardon the pun, but rather complicated to anyone without a background in physics or, more specifically, electical engineering. If you are up for it, there is a lengthy and technical, but good, explanation of Peltier cooling here.

The cold side of the element is connected to six heat pipes that connect to the CPU base, which has a special nickel coating with a copper core. Four more heat pipes are dedicated to directing the heat of the back (hot side) of the Peltier element away. Thats a total of ten heatpipes for the appropriately named V10, six cooling the CPU, and four moving heat away from the cooler towards the case's airflow. As one would expect from this, the V10 CPU cooler is huge. Make sure you look at the dimensions before deciding to buy it.