Stefan Mileschin

For builders looking to cool a hot-clocked CPU like Intel's Core i7-6700K, tower-style coolers and closed-loop liquid coolers come with tradeoffs. Go with the tower-style air cooler, and you might need a 170-mm tall monster with multiple 140-mm fans to keep your system cool and quiet. Choose a liquid cooler, and you have to find a place for a huge radiator stack to exhaust its waste heat or hope that your case's airflow is otherwise good enough to move that hot air out. Liquid coolers often leave CPU voltage-regulation circuitry at the mercy of fans around the CPU socket, too, and their pump noise can be an annoyance to those with sensitive ears.

Those tradeoffs are hard enough to make in a roomy ATX mid-tower, but builders of high-end systems in compact microATX or Mini-ITX cases might have an especially hard time finding a powerful enough cooler to make ...

http://techreport.com/review/30897/c...ooler-reviewed