Raijintek Ereboss Review

Raijintek Ereboss Review

Manufacturer: Raijintek
UK price (as reviewed): £31.99
US price (as reviewed): Currently unavailable

As a new name in the hardware industry, Raijintek has had little exposure on these pages. The company is formed by members of both Cooler Master and Xigmatek, and has a distribution partnership with Overclockers here in the UK. While it currently only has a range of CPU coolers and slimline fans to its name, its website indicates that we can expect cases and PSUs from them in the future too.

Nevertheless, it's a cooler we're looking at today, and the company's current flagship one at that. At £32, the Ereboss is less than half the price of the flagship offerings from Noctua and Phanteks, but whether it can undercut them in performance as well is another issue.

The Ereboss heatsink is a serious chunk of metal, so there's a risk of interference with taller RAM modules, and you'll also need at least 160mm of clearance in order to fit it. Raijintek has opted for a single large fin stack rather than a pair of towers, and, other than the top one, the fins themselves have a series of triangular holes cut through them, supposedly to improve air circulation and heat transfer. The large indent on one edge of the fins and the larger hexagonal hole are for screwdriver access – you'll need a long Philips model to install it.


The copper baseplate is finished with a seriously smooth nickel plating. There's a total of six copper heat pipes that pass through the plate before weaving their way all the way up through the aluminium alloy fins. The pipes are spaced evenly in a single layer through the baseplate

Supplied with the Ereboss is a single Raijintek Aeolus fan. Cutting costs by only including one fan is a sensible move so long as airflow and cooling doesn't suffer too much as a result. The fan is a 140mm model and measures in at just 13mm deep. It comes with a 4-pin PWM connector with a lovely black braided cable. It has 120mm mounting holes so as to fit the cooler, which it does via anti-vibration rubber mounts. Overclockers also sent us a second Aeolus fan (which would set you back a further £8), so we'll be testing with both. Note that you'll need a 4-pin splitter cable or a secondary CPU fan header on your motherboard in order to run both at the same PWM-controlled speeds.

While the cooler has a standard silver and copper colour, the fan comes in red and white. While we think the styling is nice, it obviously won't be to everyone's taste. We can forgive Raijintek not offering multi-coloured heatsinks like Phanteks does given the price range it's in, but given that it offers its Aeolus fan separately in different colours it's strange that only the red and white one ships with the cooler.


The cooler mounts via a universal backplate, though this is plastic rather than metal. Building up the mounting arms is easy, but after you've applied the thermal paste (in this case a small sachet of nondescript grey goo), things start to get a little tricky. The cooler is secured to the mounting arms via a crossbar that goes across its base. However, it's too easy to dislodge the crossbar when trying to screw it in, which is immensely frustrating if you're working within a chassis.

Based on our experience, we highly recommend installing this cooler outside your case if possible, as getting the fan on is also very fiddly, especially when trying to attach it at the bottom. The rubber mounts that SilverStone uses with its AR01 cooler are easily superior. Thankfully, it is possible to install and remove this cooler with the fans still attached. We should also point out that the extended height of the fans means that they'll interfere with most memory modules – we were unable to fit the second fan onto our LGA2011 rig because of this.

Specifications

• Compatibility Intel: LGA2011, LGA115x, LGA 1366, LGA775; AMD: AM3(+), AM2(+), FM2(+), FM1
  
• Weight 808g (heatsink only)
  
• Size (mm) 140 x 110.5 x 160 (W x D xH)
  
• Fan(s) 1 x 140mm Aeolus (PWM), 650~1,400RPM
  
• Stated Noise 28 dB(A) max