Raijintek Ereboss Black Review

Conclusion

The Ereboss Black CPU cooler is the second Raijintek product we’ve gotten our critical hands on here at OC3D towers, the first being the rather impressive and Gold award winning Morpheus GPU cooler.  Although the Black suffix might suggest that what you’re getting here is either an all-Black bequietesque (real word, honestly) version of the regular Ereboss, or that at the very least a cooler with a Black top plate, what you are in fact getting is the standard Ereboss, with its statuesque shiny natural coloured Aluminium fin stack minus the trade mark red and white fan but with a black fan instead.  Now we’re hardly the ones to say that calling it a “Black” edition because it has a Black fan is stretching the point a bit but well…It is stretching the point a bit isn’t it.  Still, at least if you’re not into red and white fans you now have the classic black to go for instead.

So as you’ve probably gathered from our little opening rantette the Ereboss Black isn’t actually Black at all.  What it is though, measuring in at 140×110.5x160mm (WxDxH) is a hefty piece of Aluminium fin stacked CPU cooler.  These dimensions combined with the 6x6mm Copper heat pipes arising from the Nickel coated Copper contact plate should endow the Ereboss with the ability to effectively move heat away from the chip.  With that accomplished its then down to the fan to cool the fin stack.  With such a big fin stack Raijintek have made efforts to minimise or indeed totally mitigate the fan overhanging the RAM.  To do this they’ve opted for a thinner fan than normal, and indeed at only 13mm it’s just over half the thickness of a standard fan.  Unfortunately the trade-off for this svelteness is a reduction in static pressure, with a stated value of just 1.24mmH2O being quite a bit down on what you would expect from a standard thickness fan of the same dimensions.  Regrettably the efforts made to prevent RAM encroachment don’t actually appear to have paid off as the fan still slightly overhangs the first RAM slot meaning that only standard RAM heat sinks can be used. 

If you’ve read the whole review then you’ll already know how we feel about our experience fitting the cooler.  If you haven’t read the review then you need to appreciate that we’ve been thinking long and hard about how to put a positive spin on the fitting of the Ereboss.  The only thing we can come up with is that if you’re building from fresh you’ve already got the Motherboard out so can fit the Ereboss before you put the board into the case.  If however you’re fitting this to an already assembled system and don’t want to resort to taking the Motherboard out, then there’s no two ways about it, It’s an absolute pig to fit, necessitating the use of extra-long thin shaft screwdrivers, preferable magnetic, and the need to take the roof off your case and peer in through the aperture in an effort to line up the screws with their holes.  The effort leaves you feeling like a keyhole surgeon who is performing an operation in one theatre whist standing in another.  Not good, not good at all.  Once assembled however the Ereboss runs as sweet as a nut, with the gentle hum coming from the fan belying the alleged 28dB of noise it’s thought to put out. 

We have to be honest, we weren’t really expecting the Ereboss to perform that well at all.  We suspected that the advantages of the large fin stack would be negated by the performance of the fan.  Well, we’ve had a few surprises in our time, and the Ereboss is one of them, as it held its own all the way through testing enabling a maximum overclock of 4.4GHz on the 2011 platform with our toasty 3960X.  Although looking at the charts back on page six you might not think it’s done that well as it appears to sit resolutely in the middle in all of the stats, but look a little closer and you’ll see the majority of coolers above it are AIOs and 240mm rad based kits.  In fact, aside from the Noctua D15 and D14 the only other air coolers above it at 4.4GHz are the Bequiet Dark Rock 3 and Pro 3 coolers, both of which only better it by a degree or so and the cheaper of which costs nearly twice as much as the Ereboss.

In summary then the Raijintek Ereboss is a CPU cooler with no frills classic if somewhat dated looks.  It’s well made but requires the patience of a saint and the skills of a surgeon to fit.  It is however quiet and performs extremely well, especially when you factor in the recession busting £29.99 price tag.

If the fitting had been a simple affair we would have been awarding our second Raijintek gold.  As it is however the best we can do is the coveted VFM award.  If you’re on a tight budget, have the patience and dexterity to fit it, and a case that can handle its dimensions then the Raijintek Ereboss is a very viable option. 

       

Thanks to OCUK for sending in the Ereboss for review, you can discuss your thoughts on our results in the OC3D Forums