Evercool Venti HPQ-12025 CPU Cooler Review

Final Thoughts

On its own, the Venti isn't the most stellar performer we have ever tested, but that does not mean the Venti has no upsides to it. The Venti is very compact and light-weight, even with the fan, or fans in play. It allows the user to install the cooler to the motherboard before mounting the board into a chassis, and still provides full clearance around it to install memory, get to the motherboard screws, and even get to the eight-pin connection at the top left corner.

The Venti is easy enough to install; even with directions that are not all that helpful, we still managed. With this hardware, there is also a fairly high socket pressure applied with the screws and their heavy springs. So, how tight do you go? Well we found all of the hardware will run out of threads, or get so tight that it is obvious you are at the correct point. All in all, the Evercool Venti is not that bad of a cooler in most respects.

When it came to the testing, the stock temperatures were no surprise to us. What did make us scratch our head slightly was the fact that this is a 200W TDP rated cooler, and we took it to nearly 80 degrees with only roughly 110W of CPU heat produced. In our opinion, the Venti may be able to handle that rating with two fans, but even then, we think that you would be just shy of the throttle point. We get that you can only get so much bang for the buck in a cooler, and that this does perform leaps and bounds better than a stock cooler, but your personal comfort level or rules about temperatures may leave you a bit wanting with this cooler.

The thing that really puts the nail in Evercool coffin with the Venti is that while it does beat out the stock cooler, the much smaller Gabriel, and the more expensive Shadow Rock 2, that isn't the end of the story. Looking further up the list, we see that the ETS-N30 beat it, as did the Alpenfohn Sella and Brocken ECO, and as we get to that point, we are seeing an almost four degree jump in efficiency too.

Considering all these coolers are in the same price range, and most are close in noise production, there really just isn't anything special that would make this Venti HPQ-12025 stand out in the crowd. While it does do what we expected of it, and the pricing is more than fair, sometimes it is worth $10 more or so to take that next big leap in performance, rather than getting something only slightly better than the stock cooling solution.

Product Summary Breakdown

Performance	70%
Quality including Design and Build	85%
General Features	80%
Bundle and Packaging	75%
Value for Money	70%

Overall TweakTown Rating

76%

The Bottom Line: While the Evercool Venti HPQ-12025 is indeed very affordable, we just feel that there are better bang for the buck coolers out there in this price range. While an effective cooler, we also don't think it is really capable of its rated TDP.

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