[section_title title=”Conclusion”]
Conclusion
The Gamer Storm Lucifer looked like it was up for a challenge, and it sure looked like it was going to be the victor. However, when the challenger happened to be an i7-4770K, the tables quickly turned and the odds looked bleak. Let me sum up the good and the bad of this cooler so that you can get a more vivid idea of its performance.
Upon the first impressions of the Lucifer, it appeared to be a strong contender in the lower budget arena but unfortunately it was all too good to be true. The bold claim of being able to cool up to 300W was as I originally said, unlikely, but I did not doubt the cooler and I set forth to find out anyway. It proves that it wasn’t even able to handle 4/5ths (240W for those who don’t want to work it out) of that without struggling. Whether this is down to the fan not pushing as much air as some of the other coolers, or if it is due to the physical design of the cooler itself, I couldn’t tell you. It may even be a mixture of the two, although the fins are wide enough so high static pressure isn’t a highly required thing, but pure airflow is. After testing it briefly with a high airflow fan (one of my personal favourites at that, the Thermalright TY-143), it did help to keep the temperatures a little lower but of course my results do not reflect that as the cooler doesn’t ship with such a fan.
Touching on the overall design of the cooler, I must say that I was a little confused why they packed four heat pipes so close to the back of the cooler rather than spreading them throughout the big area that they had to play with instead. This may have hindered performance slightly as there was a large amount of area that essentially wouldn’t be getting used and the heat would be more focussed on a far smaller portion of the cooler. When the real estate is available, I like to see it being used, and I think it would’ve helped a fair amount here; perhaps not greatly and certainly not good enough to make it cool 300W efficiently, but an improvement nevertheless.
Installation was almost as easy as installing the Alpenföhn K2 Mount Doom as it uses the same mounting kit, bar the thumb screws, to lock the Lucifer in place. The only bit that I found a little tricky was securing the cooler in place as the screws are so close to the body of the cooler; you need a long but thin screw driver to get in the cut out design. Other than that, it was easy enough to fit and took no more than ten minutes to mount, even after having to turn it around due to the RAM issues I faced. Tall RAM is something to be avoided if you want to use this cooler with a fan but if you already have low profile RAM, or intend to purchase low profile RAM and this cooler, then that won’t be of any issue to you.
Overall, I can’t help but feel a little disappointed. I thought that I would’ve had a cooler in my hands that could stand up to the near nuclear plant of an i7-4770K that I have but it fell short and I found it competing with some coolers a fraction of its size. Unfortunately, due to that, I will not be awarding the Lucifer with any awards today. It’s a CPU cooler, sure, but there’s better out there for your money.
I’d like to thank Gamer Storm for providing us with a sample of the Lucifer and I do look forward to seeing more from them in the near future.
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Performance
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Design
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Value
Summary
The Gamer Storm Lucifer is a large cooler and I really expected better for its size. It claims to be able to cool up to 300W of heat, but it struggles to even out perform some ITX coolers which most definitely cannot cool that amount of heat. They made bold claims, but struggled to overcome the challenge.
