What air-cooled heatsink to buy

h0tt5auc3

Honorable
Nov 19, 2013
9
0
10,510
Hello all,

I currently have a Hyper n520 that I'm getting okay performance with. I'm currently running my i5 3570k at 4.4GHz and getting max temps of 78C after about 5 minutes of prime95 on small fft's.

I was thinking about getting a TPC-812 due to the awesome reviews, plus the vapor chamber implementation seems to work pretty well. I can't get a liquid-cooled cooler due to the fact that my case (thor v2) will not properly allow for cooling without case mods, which I don't want to do. I like the TPC-812 because it wouldn't be as obnoxious as the Phantecks or the Noctua coolers, where they would block the RAM, meaning that I would have to remove the heatsink whenever installing/swapping RAM.

Will the Cooler Master TPC-812 give me a pretty big performance improvement over the Hyper n520? Or does anyone know of a better one? This just got one of the best reviews and benchmarks, so I figured I'd go with this one.
 


I was thinking about getting one of those two, but I think those are just too large, and with both of those I would not have access to my RAM. The temps of the TPC-812 are pretty much right on par with the others too: http://www.frostytech.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=2654&page=4. Would any of those give me much of a performance increase over the hyper N520 though?