Cooler Master V10 200+W Hybrid T.E.C. Cooler

Final Thoughts

The Cooler Master V10 200+W Hybrid T.E.C. cooler is no joke when it comes to overall size and need for case space to allow this cooler to function at its best. I personally have an Antec 900 and I really don't think there is enough room to allow this cooler to do its job properly. My suggestion is to measure twice and order once if there is any doubt whether this cooler will fit or not inside of your given case. Given what Cooler Master has released as of late with the Cosmos Black and their previous coolers, it looks like every rise to greatness has a few bumps along the way.

The performance of the new V10 Hybrid cooler leaves me a bit confused. With a premium selling price of well over $100 US dollars I can hardly recommend this cooler based on anything other than the "wow" factor, but even that goes away soon after you get your first temperature readings. This is where I felt my hopes got crushed a little bit. I actually had plans to run my rig with this cooler and have something that works as well as my water loop, but without the noise of the fans that I am currently running. While the V10 is a touch quieter, I don't see the justification for a swap and for now I will keep my loop intact.

It was in my findings that I believe the T.E.C. section of the cooler is getting saturated too easily with heat. This is making the T.E.C. virtually useless, as you have to keep the hot side as cool as possible to allow the potential of peltier cooling to really show its face. Maybe if it wasn't the last bit of fins to get air circulation it would perform better, but during testing the heat pipes on the cold side were hot and the hot side pipes to the fins were even hotter. Maybe T.E.C. cooling should be left on better cooling mediums such as water loops for the removal of heat to improve effectiveness!

The hard fact to swallow here is that Cooler Master has produced a very efficient cooler on its own with the V10, but the extravagant cost to obtain this cooler isn't at all justified. Considering I could go to any e-tailer on the market and grab one of a couple of contending coolers for around $50 and a Corsair Dominator RAM fan for another $20, I don't see any point in spending what they are asking. This fact is also backed by Cooler Master's own lineup of products. The Hyper Z600R is now available for $59.99 at Newegg and the V10 is almost twice the price with very little performance gain. Don't get me completely wrong here, I do feel the cooler is a solid well built oddity of the CPU cooling world, but every time I try to love this cooler the price simply slaps me in my face and brings me back to reality.