I owned the previous version of this cooler in my old Intel based system. However, good and good value though it was, it suffered from the exact same problem as every single other Intel cooler I've ever bought (and including the stock cooler, obviously) - those awful 4 plastic mounting pins. One push too hard into place and "SNAP" - it's all over. Your heatsink will not sit properly over the CPU and in turn your system becomes unstable due to the resulting uneven heat distribution.

It was with some trepidation that I opened the latest effort from Arctic Cooling to discover that...they had SOLVED my most feared and dreaded problem ! The new design involves split pins, through which you push other little pins, which holds the cooler mounting in place absolutely (if surprisingly!) well. In addition to this the main bulk of the cooler has small plates either side of the main bulk of the cooler which you screw down into the solid plastic mounting bracket.

The whole solution is utter genius, and I have total respect (and I must say doey eyed adoration) for solving a problem that has troubled me for YEARS when I've come to install my CPU in my new system builds. I cannot see how it is possible now to break the vital mounting pins - because they do not rely on any awkward screw down action - as described you simply drop the pins into the other pins.

As regard to the performance well I don't tend to measure temperatures myself but a quick look around at what others who've bought this beauty alongside professional reviews will tell you all you need to know. The 6 heatpipes are copper, not rubbish aluminium, and the rest of the design remains essentially the same as the previous version - except minus those terrible pins !

Retailing at around £15-£16 this is cheap - and anything but nasty. If you really want to waste £24.99 on an equivalent or maybe lesser CPU cooler (I notice Akasa do one similar yet it appears to have the same old awful pins) then that would be your choice but Arctic Cooling have just solved what is personally for me the single most annoying CPU cooler mounting problem in the history of computing. Now that alone surely has to command at least some kudos.