Inside the box you'll find the cooler with the included fan already attached and a box full of accessories. This box contains various installation materials, some thermal goop, and one of the worst manuals I've ever seen. In order to fit the ~20 languages they crammed into the manual, they gave illustrations and a few short sentences. Good thing the installation was relatively straightforward, but more on that later.



The Hyper 212 has a nice, clean looking construction. The heat pipes and base are all copper and the fins are aluminum. The fan attached is rated at 19dBA, 69.69CFM, and 2,000RPM, all very respectable numbers. Unlike Thermalright with their Ultra-120, Cooler Master opted for straight fins on this cooler. They are also placed pretty far apart when compared to other similar coolers like the Tuniq Tower; I think that with a 70CFM fan like the one they chose, low airflow fins were not necessary and they could have packed a few more in. On the back, you'll see that this cooler more resembles the Thermaltake Sonic Tower, in that there is no middle. I guess this is cost and weight effective, seeing as the fan doesn't pass air through the middle, but it will hinder performance a little.

If one fan isn't enough for you, there are brackets on the cooler to add another. The design on this fan bracket system is pretty flawed, though, because the cooler has to be off of your processor to add the second fan. One last note on the cooler is that it has an almost perfect base. As you can see, Gengar reflects pretty well, and it passed the razor blade test with flying colors. Continue as we put this in the test rig and see how it does.