[section_title title=”Conclusion”]
Conclusion
After my recent jaunt into the realms of liquid hybrid cooling it’s back to the less powerful but also less power-intensive coolers, those in the Air Cooler category, and Cryorig have welcomed me back in style. Yes this is a mammoth chunk that comes with all the warnings associated with very large units, and also comes with all the cooling benefits of a lot of metal and a powerful fan. Dealing with one of those warnings, I could have slid the fan up so that I could fit in the 2nd stick of RAM and as a home user that is certainly what I would have done. But I’m not really worried about the amount of RAM in my testbench as long as the testing and monitoring software does what it needs to so I didn’t. Moving the fan up would have meant having no airflow, or less efficient airflow, in the bottom 30mm of the tower, and when testing cooling performance that was more important than the amount of RAM available to me. That just leaves the GPU fitting warning and there’s nothing to do here if you have a PCIe x16 slot that’s now under a tonne of aluminium unless you can either use another PCIe slot or a extension cable and fit your graphics card somewhere, anywhere, else in your case.
OK, so the H5 Ultimate is not for everyone, but wouldn’t life be boring if we all had the same toys to play with? What about those who can play with this particular toy and can see only the benefits of all that cooling surface area? They will certainly be one of the ‘cool kids’ (see what I did there?) because the tests don’t lie, this is certainly a cooler that the competition should be worried about. The Idle tests were pretty impressive but the Load tests place this mighty beast firmly within the realm of water cooling territory. Whether it’s the awesome and almost silent XF140 fan or the proprietary ‘Hive fin’ technology doing most of that work I couldn’t tell you but together with the sheer size of this unit you get the right outcome.
Do the benefits outweigh the costs? I certainly think so. It might be a big lump which stomps all over your RAM and GPU socket, but it also stomps all over the competition and that’s what counts. Of course speaking of costs, I almost forgot… this may not be cheap at just a touch over $45 over on Amazon.com, but it’s cheaper and less messy that water cooling. Sadly I couldn’t find a UK seller but I’m sure there is one out there.
As for the final verdict, it would be rude of me not to award the Cryorig H5 Ultimate our Performance Award in addition to our Quiet Award.
Join me next time for another Cryorig cooler from this supply drop, and as always thank you to Cryorig for sending the H5 Ultimate for me to review.
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Performance
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Design
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Value
Summary
Pros:
– The XF140 performance fan is not only efficient at throwing air out but also exceptionally quiet even at full tilt
– Fitting this cooler took me literally three minutes. Its step by step process is pretty much foolproof even with the motherboard in sitú
– The cooling ability of the H5 Ultimate is simply astounding, water cooling results from an air cooler
– Cryorig provide a downloadable template for you to make up to see if it will fit before buying it
– The fan can be located higher if it interferes with your chosen RAM
Cons:
– The benefits of a huge cooler also lead to its drawbacks, the cooler overshoots the first PCIe slot as well as the 1st DRAM slot
– Fairly expensive for an air cooler
