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Akasa has established itself as a company that offers affordable cooling products and general PC gadgets. The Evo 120 is its latest CPU cooler and it shares its fundamental construction with the SilverStone NT01 although rather than using twin 60mm fans Akasa has gone for a single 120mm fan.

As Akasa also manufactures fans the cooler is fitted with one of its own 120mm fans. This along with a fan controller allows for the Evo 120 to produce very little noise at the lowest speed setting. Crank the fan controller up to full speed an it’s not silent, but far from the nosiest of coolers. I wouldn’t bother cranking the speed up though, as the performance differential is minimal.

Installing the Evo 120 is pretty straight forward, although it takes the longest to fit on a Socket-775 board due to the fact that you have to change the side brackets on the cooler first. The supplied manual is first rate and has full colour instructions, which makes a huge difference, especially for inexperienced users. The Evo 120 works with Socket-754, 939 and 940 boards as well as Socket-478 and Socket-775 boards.

Cooling performance was pretty good at a mere 26 degrees Celsius at idle no matter what the fan speed setting. At 100 per cent load with the fan speed at its lowest the CPU peaked at 51 degrees Celsius after 10 minutes, whereas at half speed it peaked at 48 degrees Celsius and at full speed it peaked at 47 degrees. Not a huge difference between the various fan speeds, so for anyone looking for a low noise but efficient cooler the Evo 120 is definitely worth a look.

At £41.07 it’s not the cheapest cooler around but you could do far worse. It’s not terribly heavy compared to some of the solid copper coolers that were so fashionable before heatpipes became an integral part of CPU coolers. Just make sure that you have enough space inside your case and preferably a 120mm air out take in the back. As we got an early sample of the Evo 120 it is not quite available to purchase as yet, but stock should be arriving with suppliers any day now.

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