[section_title title=Cooling]Cooling
Awarded By – Ben
Design – Cooler Master V8 GTS
I chose the V8 GTS for the design award as I feel it was one of the most uniquely designed coolers I personally had the chance to review. With it’s LEDs and plastic shroud surrounding it I can not help, but feel like it look very similar to something reminiscent of a Transformer. While I have no idea if Cooler Master did this on purpose, it is definitely what I see every time I look at it.
Performance (AIR) – Thermalright Macho Rev. B
Somehow or another Thermalright’s Macho Rev. B managed to top our charts for air cooling results. While I know this may be a controversial choice I can do nothing but record the temperatures which are exactly what I did. While there was not a major margin between this and the Noctua NH-D15 here at Play3r, fair is fair and the Macho Rev. B managed to come out on top.
Performance (AIO) – Thermaltake Water 3.0 Ultimate
As far as all-in-one coolers go the Thermaltake Water 3.0 Ultimate stole the show with its impressive performance. While it may have some of the louder fans out of any cooler we have tested in the past year there is no denying its sheer performance which is rather amazing. Being one of the first 360mm AIO coolers to hit the market, if not the first, the Thermaltake Water 3.0 Ultimate paved the way for others to come behind it and the competitors surely did not go about wasting any time coming out with their own variants.
Value – Thermalright Macho 90
The Thermalright Macho 90 may one of the smaller coolers to feature a tower fin array, but it is surely a force to be reckoned with. The Macho 90 features a 90mm fan as the name may suggest and the fact is, it was beating out bigger coolers featuring 120mm which would of course also have more fins in their array. Not only was it beating big coolers out, it was doing it to ones in the same price range or even some that may have been a few £££ more expensive and while the Mach 90 may be designed to be an M-ITX cooler, there is no denying its performance to price ratio which has allowed it to be awarded our 2014 value award.
Overall – Thermaltake Water 3.0 Ultimate
The reason I chose the Thermaltake Water 3.0 Ultimate to win the Overall award alongside the Performance (AIO) Award is simple, not only was this the best performing cooler we here at Play3r have ever tested, it also helped paved the way for more bigger and better AIO coolers to come in the future. Thermaltake did a great job with it and I would love to see an updated version sometime in the near future.
