Cooler Master MasterAir G100M CPU Cooler Review: From Roswell With Love

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Needs more heat pipes.

This reminds me of an old Zalman flower-style cooler I used on my Pentium 4. That worked a bit better, since it was made of pure copper, but I had to dust it a couple times per year to avoid the CPU overheating. As the pitch of the fins narrows towards the center, they're very prone to catching dust.

From that, I went to a square-style down-draft cooler for my 130 W Sandybridge-E. I did upgrade the 120 mm fan with a 140 mm oversized model.

I do find it a bit strange that the VRM wasn't better cooled. Perhaps the motherboard is not well-designed for down-draft coolers.
 

Needs more everything. To be fair it's a lightweight LP cooler so it's really aimed at compact systems. But yeah between the motherboard layout and the dinky fan I'm not that surprised the VRM temps suffer.
 
Y'all should really be embarrassed by this testing. Why would you even waste your time putting a SFF cooler rated at 130W on a system that is probably running at 250W TDP? I could have made that chart for you without running the tests.

Also, 110 degrees over ambient? Were you running this test in a walk in freezer, or are these numbers wrong?
 
The design of this is appealing to me as a replacement for the Intel stock HSF currently in use for a rig I built for office use (Intel non OCed). Which brings up an important criticism - why was this not tested against an Intel stock HSF for comparison. Why aren’t any of the reviews tested against stock for that matter??!
 
I think Mr Carver forgot that Chris Miconi was doing these on his Mini ITX 1151 rig. The reason is probably that Miconi has been producing so little content that Garrett didn't know he was still on the roster.

Would you like me to request a retest, or would you rather have us just let this one fade into oblivion?

 


Yep. I have a copper Zalman 9700LED cooler for my old trusty Wolfman-dale E8400 build from 2009 that's still kicking. The amount of dust accumulation in those fins is unreal. I take it apart and wash it in mild soapy water one a year. Not only is dust accumulation a problem, but so is grease from like say cooking in the kitchen (yes my kitchen has a PC nook and I use it mostly for recipes).
 


That might be a good idea. Eteknix did a review with a de-lidded 7700K overclocked to 5.0 GHz at 1.345v and got 95C load results: https://www.eteknix.com/cooler-master-masterair-g100m-ufo-rgb-cpu-cooler-review/4/

Being de-lidded though skews those results as I'm sure your 5930K was untouched. Otherwise, I'd suggest make like Def Leppard and let it fade away. (That's a lyric in one of their songs for you Millennials).
 
I think it would have been better to see this tested against other low profile coolers, with maybe a single tower cooler in the mix to show how much better performance can be with one of those if one has the room. I'm not in the market for a low-profile cooler, but this comparison seems a bit like testing the performance of a laptop against a group of similarly-priced desktop PCs.
 


This cooler is popping up in a lot of techtuber builds and getting a bit of attention, plus it hasn't been released in the US yet, so there is probably going to be a long tail on the traffic distribution on any review. I think it might be worth it to retest on mini ITX for that reason; the review probably isn't going to fade fast enough.
 
Do the LEDs change colours as the heat at the cooler junction builds up? Would that LED colour management come from the bios or the cooler? Why have LEDS? They add no functionality impovement, but I guess, Do-it-yourselfers want flashing lights.
 

FWIW, it strikes me as rather unprofessional to discuss editorial issues like this in a public forum.

You could simply suggest that there might've been some editorial issues around this review, without getting into this level of detail.
 
If I wasn't already keen on AIO coolers.... I have to say that this is very interesting.

Certainly looks pretty wicked! I like unique things like this, not enough of it in the market - just trying to find a case that wasn't "any colour as long as it's black" was difficult enough.
 


It comes with a small wired RGB controller that can be used to cycle colors, brightness, and modes; no software needed. However, it also states to work with the following - ASUS Aura Sync, Gigabyte RGB Fusion, MSI Mystic Light Sync, and ASRock RGB LED. So any extended functionality beyond what the simple wire controller provides will be entirely dependent on the motherboard and/or the application used to control it.
 
Did you not know that the Tom's Hardware Community is a member of our editorial decision team?

 
For what it is worth, I believe the results and debate here serve a great purpose.

Yes, this cooler is primarily focused for small systems and moderate TDP CPUs. However, how often have we seen the wrong cooler being chosen by a member on our cooling forums simply because there was lack of information or knowledge as to what these limitations ultimately resulted in?

Yes, this cooler is not well-suited to a high end desktop or workstation machine, although it does offer socket support for CPUs of this level of performance. This would mean it is far more of an exercise to understand the cooling needs of the CPU in question, not just matching up 'what fits my CPU socket'.
 


Thanks for the feedback. It looks like we made a mistake on this one. Our testing and editorial integrity is of utmost importance to both the Community and Editorial staff. I've relayed your feedback to our editors to prevent mistakes like this from happening in the future. Some readers said this elsewhere in the thread, but despite the issues of the mismatched TDP, we still do believe there is some merit to this review. We will leave it up for posterity.
 

Well yeh, Garrett now knows that Miconi is still doing the small stuff 😀
 
Miconi will retest it on a middle-rung Intel CPU, since he already has data from that configuration to compare.

 
Given what Rubix has stated, I think it's a good thing for CoolerMaster to look into the cooler/this review and our comments since having the cooler in their product portfolio, to an unsuspecting/uninformed customer, is a recipe for disaster.

Given our track record where we tend to suggest making efficient investments, this cooler needs to have it's socket support re-imagined by CoolerMaster.
 


There's no reason whatsoever to remove the review. Though the CPU used in testing is outside of the support TDP range, the review still serves a purpose. It's an excellent example of what happens when an inadequate cooler is chosen for a particular build. For that reason alone, it's worth keeping this review around.
 
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