After just over a year and a half ago of its unofficial debut at Computex, Cryorig finally released their very interesting line-up of air CPU coolers which are completely made out of copper from head to toe and what’s also interesting is that they are based on their already ongoing portfolio, that in my case being the low-profile C7 model which is this time called the Cryorig C7 Cu.
Right away upon taking the box in my hand, which is to give you some additional context fairly small compared to your so to speak regularly sized air CPU cooler models, I’ve noticed how heavy it is and that’s a good tell that the product you’re holding is made out of copper, instead of usual aluminum when it comes to air CPU coolers, as it’s approximately 3 times denser. This one is coming in at a total of 800 grams, and that’s without the fan! Of course, since copper is a more valuable material, the price of this model is also a bit higher than its original.
There’s something different with Cryorig C7 Cu
The design is definitely eye-catching, we don’t see this a lot, if at all, and it will be interesting to put it in a build and try to arrange a certain look around it. The structure of the Cryorig C7 Cu is basically completely the same as with the regular C7, and it’s not too complicated to begin with as it’s not big in size. We have a total of four 6 mm heat-pipes intertwined between 57 copper fins in an S shape from one opposite end to another, making contact in middle with a pretty smooth nickel-plated copper CPU base and taking heat off of it and dissipating it further. That said, I can handle up to 115W of TDP.
The 92 mm fan comes in this white and gray color scheme and has a 4-pin PWM header and can spin up to 2500 RPM. It’s easily removable, it has two clips on each side, so if you want to, you can remove it so can clear the air for the process of installation, just like I did. Speaking of the installation, it is also very easy and straightforward to do.
You basically have two scenarios depending on the CPU manufacturer and socket, it can both be a Intel or AMD cooler, and everything else is already in place, being it the accompanied bottom backplate which comes with the bundle or these installation plates on the cooler itself. You just need to adjust them to one of two positions, one position is for Intel’s 115x socket, while the other is for the FM1/2, AM3 and AM4 sockets, which is what I’ve used as I had an AMD Ryzen 5 2400G CPU sitting on an MSI microATX Mortar B350 chip-set based motherboard.
After you set the position of the plate, you can then thread in with fingers these long screws, or additionally with a wrench if you want to, just be sure the double check which thread hole corresponds to which socket spacing in the manual and that’s basically it. Put on your thermal paste, being it the Cryorig CP7 which comes with the bundle or in my case, Kryonaut from Thermal Grizzly, put the C7 Cu cooler on, place the bracket and tighten everything down with these hex nuts and the supplied hex screwdriver.
The bottom bracket itself already has all the necessary holes to cover these socket, so you don’t have to do anything around it, just align it properly put it on and screw everything down. If you’re having a problem with the clearance of the components on the back side of the motherboard and for some reason, you can’t use the supplied backplate, you can use a combination of also supplied washer riser and screw nuts on top of them.
After all that was done, I finally put the fan back on, connected the fan cable the motherboard’s CPU fan header, which BTW. has this very lovely white braided sleeving and also a routing canal going around the top of the fan, and went on to test it out.
As I said, I’ve used an AMD’s Ryzen 2400G on an MSI’s B350M Mortar motherboard, everything was set to default, except I loaded up the XMP profile of my HyperX Predator DDR4 RAM. This CPU seems to be the right fit for this cooler as it’s TDP is stated at around 65W.
C7 Cu delivers above average performance for a cooler its size
In idle, I was seeing the package temperature is below 30°C, or to be more precise, just around 3-4°C higher than the ambient temperature. After few consecutive Cinebench R15 multi-core rendering runs the max recorded temperature in HWMonitor wasn’t going over 67°C, while in worst case scenario in AIDA’s System Stability testing I’ve recorded a max temperature of just under 73°C. The cooler itself wasn’t showing more than 35-36°C on my thermometer gun and was basically just warm to the touch. That’s a pretty decent performance from a small footprint CPU air cooler like this one. But, there’s a catch, I’ve noticed that the motherboard default fan curve ramped up the fan speed pretty high to begin with, making it pretty noticeable sound wise and also bumping the performance a bit. In idle that was around 1800-1900 RPM, while under load it was around 2300-2400 RPM. Here’s a snippet of how loud that was, as well as visual representation through the noise meter.
After that, I went back into the BIOS and set a custom fan curve which was less aggressive, around 1250 RPM and checked want kind of temperature will I get in that scenario. This fan speed brought an almost inaudible noise, while I saw a 3°C temperature increase during idle and around 8-10°C more during load, so mostly around 80°C for the package temperature, while the clock speed went down on average for about 50 MHz, which is still acceptable, especially now considering the lower noise pollution. But, I think I’ve achieved the golden middle with bumping up the fan speed by 200 RPM more, so just below 1500 RPM, where the fan was still really quiet and the temperature was around 75-78°C, with the CPU speed again being 3,7 GHz.
Since I was pleased with what I’ve experienced so far, I’ve decided to throw another challenge to this cooler and put it on a more TDP savvy CPU – Intel’s Core i7 6700K. As expected, the CPU temperature was on the higher side as you can see it here, around 80-85°C during load, with peaks just above 90° C, but still reasonable considering what I had at hand and also that I didn’t experience any thermal throttling. For the stock purpose, it will definitively do just fine, especially if you have a well-ventilated chassis, while I would avoid any further manual overclocking. As for the fan curve, I didn’t modify it, my Gigabyte Z270X-Gaming 5 motherboard did a good job on that by default, at least during idle as it was roaming anywhere from 1300-1400 RPM, which was still acceptable noise-wise when we talk about open test bed, but during load it was maxed out at around 2600 RPM, making it really loud. I didn’t want to manually lower that down and make a custom fan curve, cause I don’t think the CPU will be useful in that scenario, it would probably throttle, but it’s still good to see what this little cooler is capable of and with some undervolting you could easily tame something like a Core i7 6700K even more.
There’s no doubt in my mind that Cryorig made a really unique and great performing product for its segment, ideal for an ITX or SFX build, but you have to consider that it comes at a price premium compared to its regular C7 counterpart, or to be precise, the C7 Cu received a price boost from the original 30$ to 50$, so that’s 20$ more in total. From this point on you’ll have to weigh in yourself if its worth that much extra, do you see value in it like so, being it with its cool looking design or performance.
