Category: Cooler
Manufacturer: Cooler Master
Product: Sphere
Gallery: Click Here
Price: $45

After going through the past few months here and the transition from GotFrag Hardware to FPS Labs, we can tell you pretty confidently that it takes a lot of work to name a company. Although our case was one of rebranding and refresh, new companies looking for a strong name have similar challenges facing them. From our recent experience, we know that the final name of a company is the result of more careful thinking than you might expect. When you look at the name of a company in the hardware industry, it is not always completely evident what exactly they do. For instance, “Antec” does not exactly scream cases, “ASUS” is not exactly something we would think of when looking at a motherboard, and “Tagan” is not really a word we would associate with power supplies. There are, however, quite a few companies that have at least a prefix or suffix that alludes to the nature of the business itself.

Cooler Master is a company that sort of doesn’t fit into either of these categories. Just by reading the name, or indeed by looking at the logo (which is just a fancy version of the name), it is clear that the company does a bit more than dabble in cooling technology. Suffice to say, a company that is called Cooler Master should be nothing short of master coolers. CM has been providing pretty plain-looking heat sink fans (HSF) to major system integrators for quite some time. These coolers, which do what they do very well, are meant to be produced on a budget and used on low-power processors in cramped OEM systems. Their ventures into the enthusiast cooling market have been surprisingly few and far between for a company that’s been in the market for 1.5 decades. Their very first foray into the enthusiast scene can probably be seen with the Hyper 6 that made its debut back in2004. This might seem like a pretty late date to get into the enthusiast level cooling market, but in reality there has only been a need for uber tower coolers and the like since the mid-P4 days. AMD’s Thunderbird processors were definitely begging for enthusiast-level cooling solutions back in 2001-2002, but the products that answered the call – namely the Goliath from OCZ – are hard to call enthusiast-level coolers by today’s standards.

Lately Cooler Master has been releasing a slew of “high-end” products that seem more centric around flare and design than tried and true cooling configurations. We’ve seen the “unique/flare” approach before with various products, all of which failed to impress at least on some level. Unfortunately, when that level is performance, there tends to be a problem. Cooler Master’s most recent cooler, aptly named the Sphere, is perhaps the most radical design they’ve submitted to the market yet. Does the Sphere round out the competition or it will it fall flat? (puns very much intended)