Cooler Master Updates The Hyper 212 With Black Edition & RGB

The original Hyper 212 from Cooler Master was released all the way back in 2007, and has remained one of the most popular after-market CPU coolers, even to this day. It’s had numerous tweaks and updates over the years, but has remained one of the most price competitive coolers on the market, and Cooler Master is now releasing two new versions, the Black and RGB Black.

The Hyper 212 is by no means the best air cooler on the market, but it offers the best ‘bang for the buck’ at $35, able to keep most mainstream systems cool and relatively quiet. They are definitely not the perfect budget cooler, because if there’s one thing that’s meme-worthy about them, it’s the comically complicated mounting mechanism used to attach them to the CPU. Even veteran PC builders struggle to install them in under 10 minutes.

Part of the black edition refresh is a modified mounting mechanism, although truth be told, it looks suspiciously similar to the old mounting system, so we’ll have to wait and see if it is indeed any better.

Apart from the new mounting plate and a lick of black paint, there isn’t a whole lot different – why change what works I guess. It uses the same 4-way direct contact heatpipes that give this cooler its edge over similar priced competitors.

The fans have been swapped out, which is fairly typical, as even in the same generation of Hyper 212s, Cooler Master would swap out the fans. For the standard Black edition, it comes with a Silencio fan, which is built for silence as its name suggest, pushing 42 CFM at 2000 RPM, with a noise floor of 26 dBa. The RGB Black edition uses the SF120R RGB, which is both louder at 30 dBa, and can push a fair bit more air at 57 CFM, at the same 2000 RPM.

The RGB Fan comes with its own controller that’s compatible with the main RGB sync systems on motherboards, such as ASUS’ Aura, GIGABYTE’s Fusion, MSI’s Mystic Light Sync, and ASRock’s Polychrome.

The Hyper 212 Black is the same $35 as previous iterations, and the Hyper 212 RGB Black is $40, which isn’t bad for the better fan and RGB controller. If you are looking for a cheap cooler for a new system, then these new Black editions should prove popular, but we’ll wait and see how the new mounting bracket works out.