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Now something completely different. Well, ok, it’s still a CPU cooler, but with a name like Macs Air Condition Kooler you’d expect it to be something pretty spectacular. It comes in a massive box, but at first glance it looks more like My First Cooler than a serious piece of hardware. The plastic shrouding surrounding the fan is the reason for the toy-like looks, although I’m sure there's a good reason for this design.

Unlike any air cooler I've seen, this one comes with a 5.25in unit that fits in the front of your case. This is specific to the MA-7121 model as the MA-7120 comes with a PCI card instead. The display shows the current temperature and some fairly random animations that are meant to show you that the CPU cooler is working. The colour of the display can be changed easily by pressing the colour button. Temperature readouts can similarly be changed between Celsius and Fahrenheit by pressing the C/F button.

What makes this cooler so special is that it is using peltier or thermoelectric cooling (TEC). This means that the bottom of the cooler is has a special cooling element fitted that is electrically cooled while the side inside the it gets very hot. Devices like this have made their way into the CPU cooling arena before but never succeeded due to the difficult construction. Another reason why this hasn’t taken of is due to the huge temperature differences on the two parts of the cooling element that meant that the likelihood of high condensation was almost guaranteed.

Although the MA-7121 didn’t show any signs of condensation it didn’t show any signs of great performance either, but I’ll get back to that in a second. Due to the size of the cooler a different retention bracket is supplied, which is fairly straightforward to fit as long as you’re fitting it when you’re building your PC. The retention mechanism however is poor. It’s really awkward to fit on to the bracket and I thought I was going to break the plastic lever off during the installation.

The cooler has a fan header connector, but if I tried to attach this to the fan header on the Abit Fata1ity AN8 SLi motherboard that I used to test this on, the fan would stop working. The 92mm fan is fairly quiet during operation and has four green LEDs in the middle to brighten things up. The cooler has to be connected to the 5.25in unit as it is powered and controlled by it. Both are powered using a standard Molex connector that attaches to the 5.25in unit.

Using an AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 processor as the test subject I ran an AMD recommended cooler with heatpipes first to get some results to compare with. At idle the CPU measured 45 degrees Celsius while after having been loaded at 100 per cent for five minutes it had peaked out at 71 degrees. Swapping the coolers around the MA-7121 started out at the same 45 degrees at idle, although the display showed a much lower temperature of 32 degrees.

The reason for this discrepancy is because the cooler gets its temperature from the surface of the processor rather than the core. Sadly, in my tests the Macs Air Condition Kooler did'nt live up to its statement, “Guaranteed to reduce CPU temperature up to 10 degrees Celsius” as it actually performed worse than the AMD recommended cooler. It peaked out at 79 degrees at which stage the fan on the MA-7121 was running at full speed. The temperature dropped down to about 75 degrees and then went back up to 79 degrees at which stage the fan again speed up.

I was really disappointed with these test results as I expected a TEC cooler to perform much better than this. And to add insult to injury the MA-7121 costs a whopping £71.09.

Manufacturer: Casetek
www.casetek.com.tw

Supplier: Scan
www.scan.co.uk
Price £71.09

Score: 4

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