Cooler Master MasterAir MA410P CPU Cooler Review: An RGB Value Pick

Early Verdict

The MA410P offers a good blend of user customization and solid performance in a medium-size tower cooler, especially for systems without room for a very large tower cooler or the budget for a quality closed-loop AIO liquid model.

Pros

  • +

    Good cooling performance

  • +

    RGB fan lighting can integrate with four-pin motherboard RGB support

  • +

    Supports most common CPUs (though not Threadripper)

Cons

  • -

    Premium price versus similar quad-heatpipe coolers

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Features & Specifications

Cooler Master is well known in the PC industry for its extensive line of cases, power supplies, and hardware accessories, but its name won't let you forget the core of its historical business' engineering and development: cooling. With that, we welcomed to our labs the MasterAir MA410P, a quad-heatpipe, single-fan, smaller sibling to the MasterAir MA610.

The MA410P is aimed directly at the thin market line separating "budget" and "enthusiast" CPU air cooling. So, how much cooling potential can we get without breaking the bank?

Cooler Master packages the MA410P with the usual assortment of installation and mounting components to accommodate most current AMD and Intel CPU sockets, although AMD Threadripper is currently not listed as being natively supported. Among the familiar boxed components, most will recognize the spring-loaded "scissor" mounting arms and a dual-purpose AMD/Intel backplate. Cooler Master has also thought well to include a small syringe of its Mastergel Pro thermal compound, although we’ll be utilizing our standard MX-4 paste, as we do for all cooler tests.

The MA410P uses Cooler Master's 120x25mm MasterFan Air Balance RGB fan to move air move over the cooling tower. As the "RGB" suggests, you get 16.7 million possible colors if the fan is connected to a four-pin RGB-capable motherboard or other driver device. If your system happens to be running a bit short on these motherboard headers, Cooler Master has provided a thumb controller for cycling through seven colors, five different brightness levels, and five color patterns to help supply that additional splash of color. The MasterFan Air Balance fan is rated at 66.7 CFM at 2000 RPM and is powered via a four-pin PWM connection. Both the fan tail and the RGB wiring are sleeved in black, braided nylon.

The MasterAir MA410P makes use of six direct-contact copper heatpipes that collect in parallel beneath the aluminum mounting base. The entire CPU contact patch is finished with a fine-grain linear mill, if not quite a mirror finish, and the 6mm-diameter heatpipes integrate seamlessly with the aluminum mounting block. The four heatpipes are slightly offset in pairs to allow airflow to tunnel past and optimize heat dissipation within the cooling tower fins, and the sides of the tower fins remain "open," where some coolers opt to use integrated fin folds to channel air directly through the cooler. This design allows airflow of the MA410P to dissipate from all sides of the cooler.

The aluminum mounting base makes use of a central pivot hole for the "scissor" mounting bracket to allow the cooler to retain stability during installation and use. The aluminum cooling fans are left unfinished for a classic heatpipe cooler look. The top fin plate of the MasterAir MA410P is black anodized aluminum, center-stamped with the Cooler Master logo.

Given that the Cooler Master MasterAir MA410P is a heatpipe tower cooler of rather normal size, motherboard component clearances are almost a non-issue. The cooler sits high enough and has narrow-enough dimensions to not interfere with nearby DIMMs and motherboard voltage regulators. In a dark environment, the RGB lighting provides a strong glow of color that isn’t overpowering or excessive.

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Garrett Carver
CPU Cooling Reviewer

Garrett Carver is a contributor for Tom’s Hardware, primarily covering thermal compound comparisons and CPU cooling reviews; both air and liquid, including multiple variations of each.

  • FD2Raptor
    "The MasterAir MA410P makes use of six direct-contact copper heatpipes that collect in parallel beneath the aluminum mounting base."

    I'm thinking somebody missed something during copypasting.
    Reply
  • rubix_1011
    It looks to be an incomplete sentence statement that should have read "The MasterAir MA410P makes use of four, six millimeter direct-contact copper heatpipes that collect in parallel beneath the aluminum mounting base."
    Reply
  • jdchen003
    So... This cooler is basically a Hyper 212 with an RGB fan?
    Reply
  • oneblackened
    So how is this different from a Hyper 212? Looks exactly the same minus some cosmetic changes...
    Reply
  • Co BIY
    I would like to see a thermal camera image of the coolers in operation. It would be interesting to see how the heat pipes and fins operate thermodynamically .
    Reply
  • Nintendork
    One would expect a comparison to the thing people actually want it to be compared with:

    The Coolermaster Hyper 212 EVO/X
    Reply
  • FD2Raptor
    The CM MA410P and its brother, the MA610P, land at the bottom of the stacks of coolers tested on Toms (Cryorig R1/Noctua D15/Scythe Fuma/Scythe Mugen 5/ Noctua U14S/U12S/Deepcool gammax 400/etc) and the MA410P is also the loudest among the bunch.

    There's absolutely no reason to buy it unless your really want that RGB fan...
    Reply
  • AgentLozen
    When was the last time Tom's did a big CPU fan roundup?
    I'd like to see the 12 modern fans get a brief analysis and then a comparison across several metrics. In the conclusion, you could give out recommendations based on classes like 1. Size/Weight, 2. Cooling Performance, 3. Noise Performance, and 4. Price. I know Tom's has done roundups like these before, but I feel like it's been a while since I've seen one.
    Reply
  • FD2Raptor
    Here's my Excel online aggregation of data from the more recent Tom's cooler review featuring:

    Cryorig R1 Ultimate / Noctua NH-D15 / Scythe Fuma / CM Master Air Pro 4 / Be Quiet Dark Rock 3 Pro / Deepcool GAMMAX 400 / Deepcool Assassin II / Noctua NH-U14S / Scythe Mugen 5 / Be Quiet Shadow Rock Slim / Arctic Freezer 33 eSports Edition / Thermalright True Spirit 140 Direct / Noctua NH-U12S / FSP Windale 6 / FSP Windale 4 / CM Master Air MA410P / CM Master Air MA610P.

    And some AIO liquid coolers in separate charts.


    Reply
  • rubix_1011
    20806526 said:
    One would expect a comparison to the thing people actually want it to be compared with:

    The Coolermaster Hyper 212 EVO/X

    Considering the Hyper 212 line is very old, it has been reviewed and compared almost literally to death. Most of our reviews cover data of other coolers relevant in price, size and release date.
    Reply