what's this hate people have against the 212 lol?
for £30 it's excellent value. do other fans really cool much better for less?
It's not that the 212 is bad or has gotten worse over the years, it's just that it hasn't really
improved. It's still as good a cooler now as it was a few years back. The thing is, competition has come along and surpassed it in a couple of small ways for around the same price.
The differences are mostly minimal between something like the 212 and an Cryorig H7. The biggest things you'll probably notice are the ease of install with other coolers and less noise with the included fans. The temperature differences between the 212 and something like the H7 are about 2-3 degrees (from what I've seen). Of course, there are a ton of variables there, including what CPU it's used on, the thermal paste used, whether the CPU is overclocked, etc.
That said, my friend and I both bought 212's for our recent i7-6700k builds. Temps on my machine are idle around mid to low 20s, with full load temps hitting roughly the mid-70s (prime95 small FFT for example gave me 77, 79, 72, and 73 across my physical cores). If I had to do it again right now? I'd probably get something like the H7 if only for how damn annoying it is to install the 212. I had a 212 on my i5-2500k and you'd think I'd have remembered how much it sucked to install, but nope. At the very least, I won't have to remove it now for quite some time.
