Coolermaster V10 review

With such a large cooler installation is always the first issue.

Because of its size our approach was to lay the cooler on its back, place the motherboard on top and literally bolt it on using four bolts at the rear of the board.

With the cooler in place, it makes removing memory sticks at best difficult, and impossible at worst.

Ideally, the airflow over the memory should be welcome, despite its first having to pass through a heatsink connected to the TEC cooling system.

Once in place and powered up, the unit relies on the motherboard to manage its fans, as most coolers do.

While that's fine, with a unit of this size and price we'd have expected some type of manual control on top.

Considering the twin fans, it's not overtly noisy – certainly you won't miss that it's running, but it's a good clean fan noise.

With six heat pipes direct to its main fin array and four more from the TEC cooler, plus a copper base, we expected great performance. An unloaded temperature of 63C is good, but is outclassed by the Prolimatech Genesis by 5C.

This performance continued through to the loaded conditions as well. Though it is out-cooling the stock unit by a good 12C.

We liked:

The idea of creating a one-stop cooling solution for both CPU and RAM is a good one, but the Prolimatech Genesis does a far better job.

We disliked:

In its attempt to bolt as much on as possible, we think Cooler Master has lost sight of simple efficient cooling. Installation is tricky and causes issues with memory. It's also overly noisy for the level of cooling it provides.

Final word:

This is an impressive piece of engineering that sadly fails to do its job well enough.