After a series of articles with AIO liquid coolers, I have prepared a change for you today. We will test the new flagship air cooler MasterAir MA824 Stealth from Cooler Master. This cooler boasts impressive specs and promises extremely high efficiency that should rival the best on the market. So I’m really curious about it, but before we torture it on a hot CPU, let’s take a closer look at it.
Results – 36 dBA
Out of curiosity I tested this cooler without the front fan as well, the results of these tests are marked as “Cooler Master MA824 Stealth (Single Fan)”.
Why is there a missing value in the chart for some coolers? Because the cooler could no longer handle the load in the specified mode, or because the fan could not be slowed down to the required level, this is typically the mode with the lowest noise level.
Are heatpipes soldered to fins?
Hello.
It does not seem so, even after close inspection with macrolens. But it’s difficult to be 100% sure, so I’ll validate this with CoolerMaster HQ, just to be sure. But if the HP were soldered, I would guess that marketing dept. would be boasting such feat on the MA824 website…
The absence of holes in contact with the heatpipes is a big indicator that the fins are not soldered.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing though. From what I have read, good press-fit fins can perform just as good as soldered ones (some examples are this cooler, the recent Deepcool Assassin IV, as well as the older Thermalright Silver Arrow), and are not easy to manufacture either since they require tight tolerances.
The main advantage of soldered fins are their supposedly better durability and performance over time.
Yes, the fin soldering does not necessarily have any impact on the cooling performance.
I once tested the Prolimaltech Megahalems rev. C and Prolimatech Megahalems Basic 81. As far as I remember (it’s been more than 10 years and I’m only vaguely fishing from memory…), the only difference besides the fins surface treatment (they were nickel-plated only on the more expensive Megahalems model) was the different contact of the fins with the heatpipe. The “only” stamp pressed Basic 81 achieved practically the same cooling performance. When I look in the archive of these tests, it was weaker, but only by a hair. In tests on a processor with a power draw of over 200 W, the difference in cooling performance was never higher than 1 °C.