Coolermaster’s Hyper48 heatsink is a little older among the list of K8 / Pentium 4 compatible coolers on the market now, but it’s still a contender. The KHC-L91 Hyper48 comes with a collection of brackets and mounting plates which enable its use on socket 478/775 Intel Pentium 4 and socket 754/939/940 AMD Athlon64 processors. That level of flexibility is great for users who are on one CPU platform right now, but looking to switch to a different CPU vendor in the near future. We should note that AMD’s Socket-AM2 is not compatible with this heatsink.

The Coolermaster Hyper48’s all copper construction is augmented by four copper heatpipes that advance the flow of heat out from the base to the upper tips of the cooling fins. As we will see shortly in the synthetic thermal test results, the heatpipes play an important role. ...