Perhaps We Need Some Larger Cases

There are a few case designs that are very nice looking, and accomplish all the things that a case is designed to do. The case is designed to hold all the components, without letting them flex too much, become dusty, or overheat.

That last part is becoming harder all the time, as people try to stuff too many heat-producing devices in too small a space. Multiple graphics cards that use the power that used to be enough for an entire system, CPUs that are using less power at idle are still using more power than ever when stressed, and no way to get every system using liquid cooling because of expense and complexity means that some things need to change.

One of the things that could help is that the common computer tower could be widened from approximately 7 – 8 inches to 10 (on average) would allow more systems to use the larger heatsink and fan combinations being engineered by the more aggressive designers.

The newest style for CPU HSF combinations is the tall vaportube and fin design, which keeps gaining more tubes and more closely spaced fins. The design allows great cooling, as well as usually being placed in an advantageous way to cool the power transistors which supply the motherboard. But the latest designs are so tall that if used in many cases, the case side must either be modified, or left off the case, which causes problems for the rest of what resides there.

Maximum PC shows another of these designs, a new entry from Scythe, which is an up and coming supplier of accessories for the PC. It is called the Mugen 2, and is absolutely huge, taking what its predecessor had and building upon it.

They just keep getting bigger and bigger. Now that CPU air-cooling manufacturers have seemingly settled on the skyscraper school of heatsink design, there seems to be a competition over who can cram the most cooling fins into the largest area. Scythe’s Mugen 2 air cooler, the follow-up to its popular Mugen series, is one of the largest coolers of this type that we’ve ever tested. But can it match the cooling power of its slightly smaller cousins, such as Thermalright’s U-120 eXtreme?

The Mugen 2 is a hefty hunk of a cooler, at 5.1 inches wide, 5 inches deep (with the included 12cm fan), and 6.2 inches high; it weighs nearly two pounds. It’s not the heaviest cooler we’ve ever tested, nor the most unwieldy, but its girth could certainly prevent you from installing it in all orientations on all motherboards. We had trouble fitting it in some orientations on our EVGA 680i SLI board—our usual preference being to install the cooler fan parallel with the rear exhaust fan. On our board, though, there wasn’t room; we resorted to attaching the cooler fan perpendicular to the rear exhaust fan. Thankfully, this didn’t seem to impact performance, as the Mugen 2 performed slightly better in our tests than the Thermalright U120-eXtreme—about 2.25 C cooler at both idle and full CPU burn.

and

The Mugen 2 ships with mounting brackets for LGA1366, 775, and AMD boards; the first two use the same bracket and backplate but different screw holes. Support for the new LGA1156 socket wasn’t available at the time of this review, but the company states it is in the works. Installation requires motherboard removal or a motherboard tray with a backplane cutout. Each of its five copper heat pipes rises into its own separate stack of cooling fins, allowing airflow between the stacks.

Perhaps case makers should start supplying scoops, like hood scoops for muscle cars, so that the cooler can be accommodated and a fresh supply of cool air will be available to keep the CPU cool.

It will also provide a place to put a case badge, like the ones that used to appear in the days of the 386, or, on muscle cars in the 1970s.  Instead of 426 Hemi, it could say Phenom II X4 965.

Huge, and effective, if you can get it in.

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