With the TPC 612, Cooler Master offers a tall heatsink with four heatpipes and two vertical vapor chambers, the latter of which Cooler Master claims deliver three times more fin contact area than traditional horizontal chambers. The TPC 612’s four copper heatpipes sprout from the cooler’s polished copper base and snake through a generous stack of aluminum fins. Once the heatpipes and vapor chamber soak up heat from the CPU and distribute it to the cooler’s fins, the included 120mm PWM fan (which has a speed range of 600 to 2,000rpm), blasts it away.
The TPC 612 measures 6.4 inches tall, and 4.5 inches of that is its stack of aluminum fins. As such, the TPC 612 provides quite a bit of surface area to dissipate heat. Those with tall memory modules will also like that the fins measure only two inches deep, and the whole unit is only 3.2 inches deep when you attach the 120mm fan. This relatively skinny design helps ensure that the TPC 612’s fins and fan won’t cause issues with a motherboard’s VRM heatsinks, either.
Cooler Master provides clip-on fan covers—one preinstalled on the included fan and another for adding a second fan to create a push-pull configuration—that make it easy to quickly attach the fans to the heatsink. The 120mm PWM fan produces between 24.9 and 82.9cfm of airflow and a noise level between 9 and 36dBA. The nickel-plated TPC 612 looks attractive inside a case, and the heatpipes are capped with rounded, reflective metal that adds a luxurious look.
The installation process consists of adding bolts into the appropriate socket slot in an Intel or AMD backplate. Then, you’ll fasten four standoffs to the bolts sticking through the motherboard. Next, you’ll select the proper mounting bracket and fasten it to the standoffs with four nuts. You’ll then install the heatsink by sliding its base over the two standoffs built into the mounting bracket, and finally, you’ll secure the heatsink to the standoffs with two nuts. Attaching the fan is as simple as snapping it over the aluminum fins. The TPC 612 supports Intel LGA775/1155/1156/1366/2011 and AMD AM2/AM2+/AM3/AM3+/ FM1/FM2 sockets.
We installed the TPC 612 in a system running Intel’s Core i7-3770K at the stock 3.9GHz Turbo Boost speed, two Zotac GeForce GTX 580s in SLI, and 16GB of Kingston’s HyperX Predator DDR3-1866 memory. After 10 minutes of letting our processor idle, we saw a maximum temperature of 34 degrees Celsius. In our POV-Ray 3.7 Beta stress test (render CPU on all cores, looped three times), the TPC 612 held the 3770K’s maximum temperature to 62 C. Next, we ran four instances of Prime95’s Small FFT test for 10 minutes, which raised maximum temps to 65 C.
TPC 612
Price: $49.99
Cooler Master
Specifiations
Heatsink: Copper base, aluminum fins, 4 heatpipes, vertical vapor chamber; Fan: 1 120mm
(600 to 2,000rpm); Warranty: Two years
Test system specs: Processor: Intel Core i7-3770K; Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-Z77X-UD4H; GPU: ZOTAC GeForce GTX 580 (2x, SLI); RAM: Kingston HyperX Predator DDR3-1833; Storage: 128GB Crucial RealSSD C300; OS: Windows 7 Enterprise (64-bit)