Cooler Master Hyper 622 Halo Review: Quiet Cooling, Ideal for Ryzen

Cooler Master has been busy updating its entire cooling lineup this year. We recently reviewed the MA824 Stealth air cooler, which impressed us with its high-end cooling performance, combined with quiet operation. We also recently tested the 360L Core, a low-priced AIO that rivals more expensive competitors.

But today we’re looking at Cooler Master’s latest mid-range air cooler, the Hyper 622 Halo. This is a dual-tower successor to the company’s classic Hyper 212 air cooler, which was considered the standard for entry-level after-market air coolers for several years. The 622 Halo is paired with Cooler Master’s latest Halo2 series fans, which are optimized for strong performance at low noise levels.

We’ll have to put it through our usual testing to see if it deserves a spot on our Best Coolers list. But first, here are the Hyper 622 Halo’s full specs, from Cooler Master. 

Specifications 

Packing and Included Contents 

The Hyper 622 Halo arrives in a cardboard package similar to other coolers of its class, that’s taller than it is wide. The inner contents are surrounded by molded plastic and cardboard. for the protection of the cooler during shipping.

Included with the package are the following:  

• Dual-tower heatsink
• Fan clips for two fans
• Two 120mm Halo2 fans
• A medium-sized tube of CryoFuze thermal paste
• PWM splitter
• Manual
• Mounts for all modern CPU sockets (including AM5 & LGA1700)

Cooler Installation

Installation of the Hyper 622 is easy and is almost exactly the same process on both AMD AM5 and Intel LGA1700 platforms.

1. If you’re running an AMD Ryzen system, you’ll need to start by removing the default retention bracket. Intel users will need to apply the backplate to the motherboard. Intel users will need to secure the backplate with included metal standoffs. Ryzen users will simply screw the standoffs into the motherboard. This is the only significant difference between AMD & Intel installations. 

2. The next step is to place the mounting bars on top of the standoffs and secure them with the included screws.

3. Apply thermal paste to the CPU and then place the heatsink against the mounting bars. Secure the heatsink with a screwdriver.

4. Finally, install the fans using the provided fan clips and then connect the fans to the PWM and ARGB headers on your motherboard.

Features of Cooler Master’s Hyper 622 Halo

⋇ Six 6mm heatpipes

 The Hyper 622 moves heat from the CPU using six 6mm copper heatpipes .

⋇ 42mm RAM Compatibility 

In the default configuration, the Hyper 622 Halo is compatible with 42mm(1.65 inches) or shorter RAM sticks. The fans touched the edges of my 43mm RAM sticks in my Intel testing setup. However, you can always raise the fan a few millimeters to insure compatibility with taller RAM modules.

⋇ 157mm (6.18 inches) height

With a height of only 157mm, you won’t have any problems fitting this cooler in most cases.

⋇ Upgraded Halo2 fans

There’s more to a cooler than just the heatsink or radiator. The bundled fans have a significant impact on cooling and noise levels. And the Hyper 622 Halo includes Cooler Master’s latest Halo2 series fans, which have been designed for lower noise levels, and are rated for 160,000 hours. This longer endurance rating indicates that Cooler Master stands by the quality of these fans, as many competitors will only qualify their fans for 50-60,000 hours of use time.

Cooling Considerations

Modern CPUs high-end, whether Intel or AMD, are difficult to cool in intensive workloads. In the past, reaching 95C+ on a desktop CPU might have been a cause for concern. But with today’s fastest processors, it’s considered normal operation. Similar behavior has been present in laptops for years due to cooling limitations in tight spaces. 

Since last fall, Tom’s Hardware has brought you cooling reviews using one of the most power hungry desktop CPUs on the market – Intel’s flagship i9-13900K. To give you an idea of what it takes to cool Intel’s behemoth, we’ve tested it with a variety of coolers from basic low-end air coolers like the Amazon Basics cooler, to high-end 420mm AIOs such as Corsair’s iCUE H170i Elite.

It’s nice to see how Intel’s flagship responds to different levels of cooling. But those results don’t always correlate with lower-tier CPUs. Today’s review features two CPUs more commonly purchased by system builders and buyers: AMD’s Ryzen 7 7700X and Intel’s i7-13700K.

LGA1700 Socket Bending

Note there are many factors other than the CPU cooler that can influence your cooling performance, including the case you use and the fans installed in it. A system's motherboard can also influence this, especially if it suffers from bending, which results in poor cooler contact with the CPU. 

In order to prevent bending from impacting our cooling results, we’ve installed Thermalright’s LGA 1700 contact frame into our testing rig. If your motherboard is affected by bending, your thermal results will be worse than those shown below. Not all motherboards are affected equally by this issue. I tested Raptor Lake CPUs in two motherboards. And while one of board showed significant thermal improvements after installing Thermalright’s LGA1700 contact frame, the other motherboard showed no difference in temperatures whatsoever! Check out our review of the contact frame for more information.

Testing Methodology

All testing is performed at a 23C ambient room temperature. Multiple thermal tests are run on each CPU to test the cooler in a variety of conditions, and acoustic measurements are taken with each result. These tests include:

1. Noise normalized testing at low noise levels

2. “Out-of-the-box”/default configuration thermal & acoustics testing.

     a.) This means no power limits on Intel’s i7-13700K, and AMD’s default power limits on AMD’s Ryzen 7 7700X.

      b.) Because CPUs hit Tjmax in this scenario, the best way to compare cooling strength is by recording the total CPU package power consumption.

3. Thermal & acoustics testing in power-limited scenarios.

      a.) With Ryzen 7 7700X, I’ve tested with limits of 95W and 75W enforced.

      b.) On Intel’s i7-13700K, I’ve tested with limits of 175W and 125W enforced.

The thermal results included are for 10-minute testing runs. To be sure that was sufficiently long to tax the cooler, we tested both Thermalright’s Assassin X 120 R SE and DeepCool’s LT720 with a 30-minute Cinebench test with Intel’s i9-13900K for both 10 minutes and 30 minutes. The results didn’t change much at all with the longer test: The average clock speeds maintained dropped by 29 MHz on DeepCool’s LT720 and 31 MHz on Thermalright’s Assassin X 120 R SE. That’s an incredibly small 0.6% difference in clock speeds maintained, a margin of error difference that tells us that the 10-minute tests are indeed long enough to properly test the coolers.

Testing Configuration – Intel LGA1700 Platform

Testing Configuration – AMD AM5 Platform