Evercool Venti (HPQ 12025) CPU Cooler Review

Evercool’s Venti CPU cooler costs $29.99 on Newegg currently, and is yet to make it to the UK and European retail shelves – but the expected RRPs will probably be in the region of £23.99 and €27.99 respectively. If you consider then that some of its similarly priced competitors are the NZXT Respire T20 (£27) and the Gelid GX-7 (£33), then the magnitude of just how good this product is starts to sink in. In practice it absolutely devours the NZXT Respire T20 in our performance tests and it beat the Gelid GX-7 by 3 degrees.

If we check acoustic performance we can see at stock i5 3570K speeds it was exceptional, with the fans only being the marginally louder than those on the super-quiet Thermalright and Be Quiet! coolers near the top of our charts. Once overclocking came in, naturally those jumped a fair amount but the Venti still remained competitive with both the NZXT Respire T20 and Gelid GX-7. Again, with price and performance in mind, the acoustic performance is well above average.

A final word on build quality before we wrap this review. It is clear that the fan Evercool provide isn’t the greatest quality in the world, if you do ever find yourself hitting 1400+ RPMs then the noise rapidly escalates to intolerable levels but thankfully ours never really went above 1300RPM on the fans default PWM profile. In most cases the same should hold true, although on LGA 2011 and heavily overclocked Bulldozer/Piledriver systems, the excessive heat might put a strain on the fan so bare that in mind – this cooler is really capable of LGA 1155, FM1 and AM3(+) CPUs with high end, but not extreme overclocks, i.e 4.3-4.5GHz. The second thing about the fan was the cable, that multi-coloured look is horrible and it wouldn’t of taken much for Evercool to make it black so that is something they should definitely consider. Having thermal paste and extra fan clips included was a surprising extra for such a budget unit and like with previous Evercool products the mounting kit was effective, even if it was slightly complex. Finally, being such a thin CPU cooler it offered 100% RAM compatibility which is excellent news for anyone looking to use some high profile kits like the Corsair Vengeance kits.

The Evercool Venti does have a few minor drawbacks but its absolutely mind blowing bang-for-buck mean that you will be hard pressed to find anything nearly as good for the same price. The Evercool Venti is priced like an entry level heatsink but performs like a mid-range heatsink. It boasts impressive acoustics, good overall build quality and a one year warranty, even though the fan is lacking a bit of attention to detail we still think the Evercool Venti goes above and beyond what we would expect for an Editor’s Choice-standard product. Consequently we are happy to award the Evercool Venti with our Editor’s Choice award, if we could give it something better we would, but we can’t – so well done Evercool for making such an excellent product.