Summary: Kingston is one of those companies who seem to have been around in the PC hardware industry forever. They have their fingers in many honey jars and today I will be taking a closer look at their “HyperX Fan”. A product which looks and design are something out of the ordinary.

INTRODUCTION

The last couple of years we have seen a general increase of focus on system cooling in the hardware business. Something that was unheard of just a couple of years back is standalone RAM memory coolers. Today, all high end memory manufacturers put on more or less cool looking memory heatsinks on their high performance RAM memory modules.

Kingston have taken it even further and launched a standalone cooling solution for memory modules, the Kingston HyperX Fan. At TestSeek.com we have currently collected 6 expert reviews and the average score is 88% which is a very high average expert rating. The product has also won no less than 6 (!) awards from the reviews.

The HyperX Fan is available as a standalone product or bundled with Kingston’s 6GB 2000- and 1800MHz triple-channel memory kits with the T1 heat spreaders for Intel Core i7 systems. Let’s take a look at the specifications:

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

The HyperX fan comes in a small and thin cardboard box. As you can see from the images below, there’s an opening in the box where you can see the upper side of the heat sink with its two fans. Turning the box over, I found the specifications printed on it in diverse languages.

When I opened the box I found a small English (only) manual and the plastic tray which protects the components of the HyperX Fan. The device comes disassembled, but it took me no more than two minutes to fasten the 4 provided screws.

KINGSTON HYPERX FAN IN DETAIL

The HyperX Fan is a very simple product. It’s made up of only 3 aluminum pieces that are assembled by the means of 4 screws. The main top piece holds the two 60mm fans. As you can see from the images below, the unit has a nice bluish metallic color to it. It’s the same color and material (anodized aluminum) as Kingstons T1 series.

Both fans are 60mm and of the 12V type, but it’s also possible to run them to 8V and 13.5V. The connector is of the standard 3 pin type.

The sides are two mirrored aluminum plates with the characteristic HyperX series “X” on the sides of them.

INSTALLATION AND TESTS

As I said above it’s really easy to assemble the different parts of the HyperX Fan. The next step is to fasten the assembled heat sink to your memory units which wasn’t any more complicated; all you need to do is adjust the same four screws as I talked about above.

Of course Kingston wants us to use their own products, so the HyperX cooling solution is only compatible with their own memory modules and more specifically the Kingston HyperX T1 Series. I had a kit of 3 x 2GB DDR2 (1066MHz 2.2V) lying around which I used for this review.

I overclocked this package using 2.35V with a frequency of 1120MHz (normal: 1066MHz 2.2V). I measured the temperatures with and without the HyperX mounted on the modules. Check out the graph below to see the results:

As you can see from the graph, I got some quite substantial improvements of the temperature both when the system was on full load and in idle mode. Still, we are not talking about any groundbreaking results, maybe because the T1 series are already equipped with a fairly effective cooling solution.

The operation of the fans at full fan rotation speed cannot be described as quiet, even though Kingston presents them as “Whisper-Quiet” at their website. I lowered the fan rotation speed to around 2500rpm where I felt the noise became a soft humming which didn’t disturb me at all.

A little note about the noise is that I did the test in with a system on my desk, not mounted in a case which would further diminish the noise level

CONCLUSIONS

This is clearly a product built for gamers, overclockers and other true enthusiasts from the PC genre. The Kingston HyperX Fan is a product which makes your system look cooler and which actually makes it cooler in the true sense of the word. Maybe it’s not the most useful product in the world, considering its limited compatibility, but if you want to spice up your system a bit; it’s a must have.

The noise level on max speed wasn’t acceptable to me, but when I lowered the rotation speed I had not problem at all with it. The price of the unit is around $25 (18€) which seems perfectly alright to me.

Pros:

• Made of anodized aluminum
• Attractive design
• Good cooling performance
• Low price

Cons:

• Noisy at full rotation speed
• Poor compatibility

The final score is 85 out of 100 owls, and we give the “Kingston HyperX Fan” our Recommended Award.

Thanks goes out to Kingston for letting me review this cooler.

Author: Manuel González Fernández

Translator: Vince Emiloz Sanderson