Reeven HANS RC-1205 CPU Cooler Review

Today we are going to take a look at a CPU cooler by Reeven, a name that you might not hear amidst the top brands yet, but they are rising and like many others, they also have their own color theme, yellow which makes them stand out. Reeven is a company that mainly focus in CPU cooler and related accessories but they are also looking into more products and have recently released some ATX chassis, though today we are going to review the HANS RC-1205 CPU cooler.

HANS RC-1205 is a single tower CPU cooler which uses 1x coldwing 120mm fan. There are a total of 4x 6mm nickel plated heat pipes which are jointed with polished copper base for best performance. There is another model of HANS, RC-1205n which doesn’t make use of nickel plated heatpipes.

Reeven’s take on the cooler:

HANS, the Compact tower CPU cooler suitable for most PC case, is the best choice for performance to budget ratio.

 

Specification:

Model Number	RC-1205 / RC-1205n (NON NICKEL PLATED)
Socket	INTEL: LGA 1150 / 1151 / 1155 / 1156 / 1366 / 2011 AMD: AM2 / AM2+ / AM3 / AM3+ / FM1 / FM2 / FM2+
Overall Dimension	(W)133 x (H)155 x (D)81.5mm
Fan Dimension	120 x 120 x 25mm
Heatpipe	Ø6mm x 4
Fan Speed	300 ~ 1500RPM
Air Flow	16.6 ~ 82.1CFM
Static Pressure	0.003 ~ 0.067inchH2O
Noise Level	4.0 ~ 29.8dBA
Weight(with Fan)	710g

 

Unboxing:

Like always, starting with the unboxing of the sample, we received the HANS CPU cooler in a cardboard box. The box is themed in brownish color and on the front we have a picture of the CPU cooler, model name, the company logo and the CPU compatibility list. HANS comes with a universal mounting kit so it can be used with almost any motherboard.

 

On the right side of the box, we have the same picture but this time we have some features listed at the bottom as well

 

 

Then at the back we have geometrical images of the cooler and the air flow direction and specifications written in multiple languages at the bottom.

 

And on the last side we have some precautions about the CPU cooler.

 

On top of the box, we have the company text and slogan “Don’t think, feel it!” and some features listed in text.

Once you open the box from the top, this is what you’ll be looking at. The fan and the heatsink is separated by a foam sheet, while the box behind the heatsink contain the mounting kit and instruction manual.

To prevent heatsink from being damaged inside the box, we have a container at the bottom that keeps the heatsink is place. Reeven has done a good job packing the HANS.

This is what the HANS cooler looks like without the fan being mounted on the heatsink.

 

Closer Look:
Now let’s take a closer look at the heatsink design and the fan below.

 

So this is how the heatsink looks like. As usual, we have the heat pipes going all the way from bottom to the top through the fins. I haven’t counted the fins but they should be numbering around ~50+ or something.

 

if you notice, there’s a locking mechanism present above the base of the CPU cooler, that’s where a mounting bar will go to fit the CPU cooler in position. More on that later.

 

This is the part that’s usually on the display from a window chassis, and to make it attractive we have the company’s name on the top and a stairway type of design on heatsink which of course make it look cool.

 

 

At the bottom we can have a clearer picture of the how heat pipes are arranged on the CPU cooler. 2x heatpipers are present in the inner side while 2x heatpipes near outer side.  Also on the base we have a safety sticker applied that should be peeled off before we apply the thermal compound and mount the cooler. This is one of the most important part as you might have seen some people on social media blaming their coolers for high temperature just to find out later that they didn’t peel of the sticker from base.

 

Now let’s have a closer look at the cool wing 12 fan. The fan has a total of 11 fins and the 4x pin cable is braided and is long enough to reach far corners of ATX motherboards. One thing to point out is that on the corners of the fan body, this time around, we don’t have silicon washers to make the contact a little comfortable.

 

 

So coming down to the box we got with the cooler, we have a plastic container with lots of stuff in it, while the cardboard box also had 2x fan clips and the instruction manual.

 

Inside the plastic container, we have 3 more plastic container, one containing the backplate, other the screws and little wrench while the last one containing spacer, washers and thermal grease. Ohh the mounting bracket didn’t had any plastic container unfortunately, poor guy.

 

And that’s how the HANS looks once the fan is mounted on the heatsink.

 

Installation:
Now let’s get to the tough part of the review where all the heavy lifting is done (just kidding). There are various steps you’ll need to go through for the installation of the HANS on your motherboard.

 

 

So before installing the CPU cooler, you’ll need to grab your cooler backplate, insert the 4x backplate bolts through it and insert the 4x silicon washers over the bolts.

When that’s done, you’ll need to place the backplate on the back of the motherboard and insert the bottom of bolts into the 4x holes near the CPU socket on the motherboard.

Then once the bolts are through the holes, flip the motherboard and insert the 4x spacers on the bolts.

Once that’s done, you’ll need to place the mounting bracket on top and place 4x nuts on the bolts and fasten them up. You can use the wrench that came with the cooler or you can use your own tools for this purpose. One important thing to mention is that you must place the bracket in such a way that one of the hole on bracket it facing the RAM side while the other one is facing the motherboard I/O ports side.
Now you can install the CPU in the socket or if you feel it’ll be uncomfortable to install the CPU in the socket, then you can do this before installing the mounting bracket.

Note: There are 3x holes on each corner of the bracket, the bolts will only go through the one’s that is assigned for the preferred socket/motherboard. Mine is a LGA 1150 motherboard, so they went through the middle hole.

Next, you’ll need to apply the thermal grease that came with the cooler or you can go with your own brand. Now insert the mounting bar in place over the base of the heatsink carefully. Once that’s done, gently place the heatsink over the CPU, but don’t forget to peel of the sticker from bottom base before. Make sure that the hole on the mounting bar and mounting bracket are in line. Once in place, put the screws for mounting plate on the mounting bar and fasten them up all the way through the mounting plate. Finally mount the fan on the heatsink, plug in the CPU fan 4x pin cable into the motherboard and we’re all set.

Ohhh and believe me, the instruction manual does a better job at explaining the installation process than I do :D

 

RAM clearance:

 

When it comes to the gap between RAM slots and the cooler, there isn’t much. When it comes to low-profile RAMs like HyperX Savage, you won’t have any issue installing them even into the nearest slot to the cooler. But when it comes to RAM with somewhat big heat spreaders like Avexir Blitz or Avexir Raider, you’ll be able to install them to the slot nearest to the cooler as well, though they’ll be slightly pushed against the fan which I won’t assume is risky. Ohh and don’t mind the RAM in the last pictures, they’re pushing each other themselves, not cooler’s fault.

 

Test Rig Specifications:

CPU	Intel i5 4690K (3.9GHz-4.5GHz)
Motherboard	Gigabyte GA Z97-HD3
CPU Cooler	Reeven HANS
RAM	Avexir Blitz 1.1 2400MHz
HDD	Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200RPM
SDD	PNY Optima 120GB
PSU	Chieftec Ntro 80+ Bronze 1200W
Case	Open Air

 

Softwares:

Prime 95

MSI Afterburner

 

Acoustic Performance:
When it comes to the acoustic performance of the CPU cooler, the HANS is a really quite one. You can barely hear the sound of the cooler even when in open rig test. Once you install it in a case and close the side panel, I’m sure you won’t be able to hear it amidst the environmental noise. TO be honest, my GPU fans made more noise than the HANS at full load. I couldn’t create a graph for this test yet as I can’t find a silent enough room or place where I can do the test with a dB meter. The most silent place I know shows 30+dB at minimum. I do plan on updating the review with graph as soon as I have a place for this test.

 

Thermal Performance:
Thermal performance is divided into tests. One where we tested the coolers on i5 4690K at 3.9GHz which is basically the turbo frequency of the i5 4690K and second where we tested the cooler on i5 4690K on 4.5GHz which uses rather high voltage. On both frequencies we tested the cooler when the system was at idle or at full load. Before noting down the temperatures, we left the system idle for 10 minutes so that the CPU cooler could reach its peak point of cooling and CPU on its peek point of producing heat. During the test, the ambient temperature was 28C.

 

Compared to the other two coolers there isn’t much of a difference in the temperature when the system was idle, not that I was expecting much here. But as soon as we ran the Prime95 stress test, the system crashed on the stock Intel cooler. But compared to the S40, we have a difference of 10C with HANS. Even though the temperature seems a little high for 3.9GHz at the low voltage provided to the chip, it’s done a good enough job at keeping the CPU under what I believe as the safe zone.

 

Though the story is different when it comes to the overclock of 4.5GHz which uses rather high voltage compared to 3.9GHz. I didn’t even tried to hook up the CPU with the stock cooler on 4.5GHz OC as it already hit 97C on the 3.9GHz OC. The S40 on the other hand did manage to keep the CPU at 43C on idle but as soon as we hit the stress test button, the system crashed as temperature reached beyond 90+C. Whereas we have the HANS at 40C on idle, but on load it doesn’t really perform well at 4.5GHz reaching 85C. That’s not the performance I would want if I have my CPU overclocked to 4.5GHz.

 

Conclusion:
Aesthetically, the HANS looks just like any other single tower CPU cooler you’d see on the market with multiple heat pipes and some fancy design on the top with some curves here and there. Whereas most of the coolers have heatpipes edgy point on top, we have a plane surface on top of HANS. The yellow colored fan has it’s own attractiveness and it does stand out in the whole system whatever theme your system might have.
When it comes to the acoustic performance of HANS, it’s rather really quite as compared to its big brother that we’ll be reviewing after this. You can barely hear the sound from HANS even in open air setup, so if you were to put it in a closed case, I’m sure you’re not hearing any sound at all from the cooler.
When it comes to the thermal performance of the cooler, HANS performed well under mild overclock and beating the GAMMAX S40 by 10C on 3.9GHz and keeping the CPU in safe zone but when it comes to high overclock, HANS might not be the best choice for that.

All and all, if you’re looking for a budget aftermarket cooler to replace your stock cooler with some potential to keep your CPU cool under a little bit of overclocking, then HANS is a great choice for that. I would like to rate 4.5/5 stars.

 

Reeven provided us with the HANS CPU Cooler so we could do a showcase and share thoughts on the product. All opinions are 100% mine and mine alone.