Raijintek Morpheus GPU Cooler Review

Raijintek Morpheus GPU Cooler Review

Manufacturer: Raijintek
UK price (as reviewed): £44.99 (inc VAT)
US price (as reviewed): N/A

Taming your CPU is fairly easy these days, even with an overclocked one. There are plenty of quiet CPU coolers out there and many offer good cooling while reducing CPU-related noise to inaudible levels. Despite quiet case fans, silent SSDs and efficient PSUs, there remains one culprit for noise in your PC, especially during gaming sessions - the graphics card.

GPU coolers have come a long way in recent years, but plenty of tests we've completed such as in our Water-cooling the AMD Radeon R9 290X article prove that they're still not great at dealing with the heat. This is especially so in the case of AMD's single GPU flagship, which actually performs better once it's water-cooled. The most obvious issue, for anyone that's concerned with noise, is that they're loud. During games, your graphics card will likely be the noisiest component in your PC, so its no wonder that most people that water-cool their PCs will water-cool their graphics card.


Water-cooling is an expensive business though, and there are risks, albeit small ones, even if you do it properly. Opting for a graphics card that has a beefier cooler can raise the price too and you're still at the mercy of the fans that are included. There are a number of GPU coolers on the market that aim to fill the gap between custom water-cooling and enhanced coolers, though, and Raijintek has one of the more elaborate in the form of the Morpheus.


The idea is you replace your GPU cooler entirely and use fans of your choice to cool the heatsink - an interesting idea that's far from new, although the price tag of £45 is actually fairly reasonable compared to some of its rivals. Needless to say, it will add a huge amount in terms of size to your graphics card, with the heatsink alone making any card triple slot with four slots out of action to mount two standard 120mm fans as well.


The heatink itself sports a fairly dense array of 129 fins and these, the polished baseplate and the copper heatpipes are all nickel-plated. As such, it's certainly not dull-looking and it's almost a shame to have to slap two boring 120mm fans on top of it. Those fans will add another 20mm to the edge of the PCB too. Our test kit, using a Radeon R9 290 graphics card, ended up being 28cm/11in long in total, while the heatsink weighs in at just over 500g.



Compatibility is obviously key with any product such as this as there are scores of models out there, unlike CPU coolers, which just have to contend with a handful of sockets. However, Raijintek claims the Morpheus supports a surprisingly wide range of graphics cards, and unlike full cover waterblocks, you're not entirely beholden to using reference models either.


In the box is a plethora of heatsinks and thermal pads, which you'll need to attach to the PCB having removed the cooler. Thankfully the adhesive was fairly strong and the instructions straightforward and we fitted the VRM cooler and numerous RAM heatsinks in less than 10 minutes.

Specifications

• Dimensions (mm) 254 x 98 x 44 (w x d x h)
  
• Weight 515g
  
• Compatibility AMD - Hawaii chip: R9 290/290x, Curacao chip: HD 7850、7870 xt; R9 270/270x, Nvidia - 650, 650Ti, 660, 660Ti, 680, 760, 770, 780, 780Ti
  
• Cooling capacity 360W