Specifications, Availability and Pricing

Following how the chart presents the information, let's start with saying that the TPC 812 can and will fit on all of the latest CPU sockets.

The measurements of this tower style cooler in the pre-released chart are a bit misleading. The 163mm doesn't change, that is the height of the cooler with or without the fan. By my measuring device, the cooler is 150mm thick with the fan on and 74mm without it. As for the width of the TPC 812, I see 138mm and that is with the plastic fan clips adding a few mm in that measurement. Working to remove the heat from the copper base, there are six 6mm copper pipes that have been nickel plated along with the base to fight corrosion.

What makes this 1044 gram cooler special is that Cooler Master includes vertical vapor chambers to also take on some of the heat load associated with today's CPUs. These vapor chambers are mounted horizontally in the base above the heat pipes and are bent to a vertical alignment for the fins. Each of the two chambers is roughly 200mm wide and 3mm thick working like a super efficient fat heat pipe.

Taking on the task of cooling the TPC 812 comes down to the single 120mm, A12025-24RB-4CP-F1 fan included in the box. This is a 4-pin PWM controlled fan that offers a touch more than 86 CFM at 2400 RPM. That should aide tremendously in the cooling ability as there is a 43 layer array of 0.5mm thick aluminum fins and a full array of pipes and the chambers to deal with. While the TPC 812 arrives with only one fan in the box, they do include the same plastic clips that are used on the included fan so you may add a pull fan for even better results.

As I looked for the cooler via Google or PriceGrabber, searches came up empty. Since the cooler has been around for a month I found this strange and dug a bit deeper. A manual search at Newegg came up with the goods with the Cooler Master MSRP of $69.99.

I got to tell you, it's been a while since I have looked at a cooler lower than $80 in retail. In fact, it's been quite some time since I ran a standard tower cooler of any sort. That is good in two ways. The first is that we get a "standard" for other tower coolers to compete with in the thermal results charts and the second is that I have no idea how it is going to handle my abuse.

I am as eager as you are to see how the TPC 812 handles its business; so let's get right to it.