Noise and Fitment

Before getting into testing I did need to get the Hyper 212 Evo V2 installed and frankly this isn’t something I look forward to with the old design. Cooler Master used to use the X shaped top bracket that you would have to slide through then spread out. With the V2 this was another area that they changed. They went with a slightly more modern design that is closer to what Noctua has been doing and some AIOs as well. They require you to use their backplate which you put pins in and then clip into place. These push up through the mounting holes and you installed these standoffs. I was surprised that this didn’t tighten all the way down on our board and I would prefer a design that sticks with the stock backplate which is metal.

From there you install the two C-shaped brackets and lock them down with thumbnuts. This design still allows you to be able to remove the CPU if needed which is nice. Then you spread the included thermal paste and you mount the cooler on top with its two mounting screws. Just dropping the X bracket though makes a world of difference, you used to have to hold that in place and fight with it to get the four corners mounted.

Once installed I did want to confirm the fitment with memory and you can see here on our board there was room and more on the fan side. 

From there I jumped into noise testing. For that, I set up our decibel meter 18 inches away from the testbench and run through a few tests. I test at 100% and 50% fan speeds to get an idea of the noise range that the fan will make. Like with the SickleFlow fans on the ML280, the Hyper 212 Evo V2 did better than you might expect, especially at 100% fan speed where it was 38.7 decibels. This was still higher than the higher end coolers, but let's keep in mind the price range. Then for the most important test, I warmed things up with the AIDA64 Stress Test on the CPU workload for a half hour then recorded what the noise level was with the stock profile provided by our Asus motherboard.