Performance Analysis

We don’t have many air coolers in the charts yet for our new cooler test rigs, but we can nonetheless make some appropriate comparisons. The Be Quiet! Dark Rock 4, for example, costs £65 but focuses heavily on performance and low noise compared to the aesthetic focus here. On the LGA 1151 rig, this pays off, as Cooler Master’s effort is 5°C off what the former achieves. Still, it isn’t a dreadful result for Cooler Master, as it keeps pace with high-end all-in-one liquid-coolers from Corsair, even if it is only when they’re set to their Quiet profiles.

On AMD’s mainstream platform, AM4, things are better for Cooler Master, as the delta T of 59°C is only 1°C behind the Be Quiet! cooler this time, although it is easily the noisier cooler of the two.

Since Socket TR4 (Threadripper) isn’t supported, we’re left with our 18-core LGA 2066 test rig to really stress the MA410M, and unsurprisingly it isn’t able to cope with the overclock here, causing our CPU to throttle back. The same is true of the Be Quiet! cooler as well, and while fewer cores or running at stock speed might allow the MA410M to manage on this socket, the truth is you’re probably best sticking to liquid-cooling of some description here.

Noise output from the two fans isn’t too loud, but it’s certainly audible when they get going. If low noise is a top priority, this won’t be for you, but for everyone else it should be tolerable in this department.

Conclusion

Since we know it’s based on the MA410P, the MA410M is effectively a £40 cooler with added extras. One of those extras is of course a second fan, but ultimately it’s safe to say that performance is unlikely to be where it might otherwise be with a £60 air cooler, and this is confirmed by the Be Quiet! Dark Rock 4, which is better performing and has a lower noise output yet costs just £5 more.

While traditional priorities (performance and noise) can be better satisfied elsewhere, then, the RGB phenomenon can’t be ignored. So does Cooler Master do a good job with it here? We’d argue that it does: The lighting is vivid and nicely dispersed, and the internal tunnel effect is rather cool. You also have the ability to control it manually through the controller or hand over to your motherboard, so there’s plenty of ways to tune it to your setup.

While we suspect most users interested in a RGB-heavy build will opt for an all-in-one, the MA410M certainly takes the crown for the best RGB-enabled air-cooler. If that's what you're after, the Recommended badge below is for you, but if not, we're surprised you made it this far into the review!