CoolerMaster GeminII

It's the King Kong AND Godzilla of aircoolers.

The GeminII is, for want of a better word, huge. Rather than take the skyscraper option of building upwards like the popular tower coolers, CoolerMaster has opted to build outwards, meaning if your fans are pointing down and particularly high CFM that your RAM can get cooled as well, not to mention the VRMs, MOSFETs et al surrounding the processor. While at first you’d think it could be reorientated to cool the northbridge as well on most boards, it seems that the graphics card will get in the way of that little plan.

The horizontal nature of the GeminII means fitting it into some cases will be a challenge as the cooler sits flush with the back of the motherboard for 124.6mm and the top for 175mm, creating potential interference. Attaching two 120mm fans – not supplied – extends the length further to 240mm, with one of the fans hanging off the end of the heatsink. Aluminium fins and a copper base make up the impressive 847g weight, overall creating a monster of a sink that’s not for the faint of heart, or weak of liver, yet for some reason feels deceptively light compared to the usual tower coolers.

The mounting system is reasonably straight forward for those who have installed heatsinks before, and those who haven’t won’t it find too much of a challenge, short of figuring out which way the rails go that are required to attach the 120mm fans. After screwing the two Nexus Real Silent 120mm fans down to said rails, we eased CoolerMaster’s latest experiment onto Chernobyl’s 80W heat generating slug and awaited the results.

The GeminII didn’t disappoint, managing to tame the boiling beast down to an impressive 42°C in an ambient temperature of 28°C, putting it in such hallowed company as the Thermalright Ultra 120 and Thermaltake Big Typhoon VX.

So long as you can fit it in your case and don’t fear it ripping the motherboard apart when transporting, the GeminII is an excellent and effective cooler.