Installation
For installation, I made the mistake of mounting the fans on to the heatsink before install it to the motherboard. Don’t mount the cooling fans first, instead install the heatsink to the motherboard, then mount the cooling fans afterwards.
After mounting the Intel CPU bracket and securing the metal mounting plates, you need to use the included screw driver to secure the heatsink in place. Once the heatsink is installed, now you can mount the fans using the included fan clips. The larger 140mm fan should be mounted in the center of the twin towers.
Depending the height of your ram, you can either install the smaller 120mm fan over the ram or mount it on the other side over the I/O hood. In my case, I mounted the 120mm fan over the I/O hood, so I can have easy access to my ram.
Test setup and Testing Methodology
The system used for testing is listed in the table below. Ambient temperatures were kept at 24 degrees Celsius +/- 1 degree. We used the included thermal paste, which I think is more than adequate. The fan speed was set to default. The idle temperatures were recorded after 10 minutes of idle and max temperatures were recorded after a 5 minute torture test using Adia 64 CPU System Stability Test and recording the Cores values and taking the average.
| CPU | Intel Core i9-13900K |
| Cooling | Cougar Forza 135 CPU Cooler |
| Motherboard | ASRock B760 PRO RS |
| Cooling Fans | Cougar MHP140-A (center fan) Cougar MHP120 (side fan) |
| Ram | Patriot Viper Gaming Venom DDR5-6200 32GB kit |
| SSD | Lexar MN800 PRO 2TB SSD |
| PSU | MSI MPG A1000G PCIE5 1000W |
| OS | Windows 11 |
Idle Temps
The idle temperatures were pretty much what we expected. With no workload, the average idle temps was around 34 degrees Celsius.
Load Temps
At 100% CPU load, tempratures averaged around 69 degrees Celsius, which is pretty phenomenal. Yes, you read it right 69 degrees Celsius! Who said air coolers are insuffeicient?!
I’m guessing the 7 heat-pipes on the heatsink, as well as the 2 cooling fans with high flow rate is really helping to keep the temperatures down.
The nosie level did go up … but that’s expected when the CPU is at full load. It’s not that loud to be honest, and I think it’s acceptable in most of the time.
Now lets move on to the Conclusion and Verdict!
