I'll be jumping on a new i5-4670k soon, and I was looking into some budget coolers that could get the OC done for a fairly reasonable price. Microcenter has the Xigmatek Gaia on sale for $37, and I was wondering if anyone here had any knowledge of how the Gaia performed.
(oh and the TPC 812, if anyone happens to know about it, either)
I'll be running the MSI G41 PC-Mate mobo, so I'm probably expecting OCs of ~4.1-4.2 GHZ.
I picked up a Gaia from newegg for $19.99 a few months back. It's a great cooler for very mild overclocks. It performs pretty much exactly as a Cooler Master hyper 212. I know this personally because a friend and I swapped my gaia for his 212 for a quick experiment and they performed within 1 or 2 degress celcius of each other under full load prime95 small ffts.
I have an i7-3770k overclocked to 4.3ghz, 1.175 volts. With the gaia running prime95 it maxes around 70 celcius. Just playing games for long periods of time it gets up to 63-64C.
The Gaia starts to show it's budgetness around 1.2 to 1.3 volts which I would need to get to 4.4-4.5ghz. Temps really start to ramp up fast.
For mild overclocks, it works great. Although, if you really want to push your new chip to get all out of it, invest a few more bucks. I would think for 40 dollars, you can find something better than the gaia.
don't expect to get past 4Ghz on haswell
The Xigmatek Gaia is not that good. I'm saying this based both on reviews and personal experience. Check Hardware Secrets and Frozen CPU for some decent comparisons.
Instead, in the $35 range, Get a Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO
It is one of the best, if not THE best, budget CPU cooler you can get.
I'll look into it.
Thanks for the heads up!