Gamer Storm Lucifer CPU Cooler Overview
Deepcool is a name that’s been around for some time now and we’ve reviewed their CPU coolers in the past with great results. The Gamer Storm Lucifer CPU Cooler is a high-performance cooler that provides a dual tower design and is also compatible with an AMD platform.
They’ve added the Gamer Storm line to their brand focusing on high-end gaming coolers for both CPU and VGA. It’s from this new Gamer Storm lineup that our latest Deepcool CPU cooler came – the Lucifer.
The Lucifer is touted as being a silent cooling powerhouse for today’s high-end CPUs and also as a completely silent passive solution to today’s mainstream CPUs. Deepcool was kind enough to send a Lucifer over for us to check out so let’s get to it.
The Lucifer comes packaged in a high-gloss black cardboard box with embossed green metallic-looking logos. The top just has the Gamer Storm logo while the front just has the Lucifer logo.
Both sides list the logos once again along with specs, features, and general info about Deepcool. The main box has a thin cardboard sleeve around it. Once you slide the sleeve off you see this box here. One side has half of the Gamer Storm logo while the other simply says “CPU Cooler.
In what is possibly the most unique CPU cooler packaging I’ve come across, the outer halves of the box fold open as shown.
Under the cardboard protector flap, we have the cooler itself wrapped in a plastic bag along with a black box on either side of it. One box houses the fan while the other holds the hardware. And here we have the cooler unpackaged in all its rather large glory. The cooler itself is LARGE by any means.
Features of Gamer Storm Lucifer
There are six 6mm heat pipes that are staggered throughout the fin structure. The large wing-shaped fin structure is to improve heat dissipation in passive mode.
The fan included with the Lucifer is a 9-bladed 140mm PWM unit sporting 120mm mounting holes. The frame and blades are green plastic; however, the exterior of the frame has a black rubberized coating on it.
The fan’s cable is a 4-pin PWM covered in a stiff sleeving. The center hub of the fan has a chrome Gamer Storm logo on it. The top side trailing edges of the blades have small vortex generators to help dampen airflow noise.
The back side of the fan has just a Gamer Storm Lucifer CPU Cooler logo decal in the center of its green frame. The included accessories contain everything needed to mount the Lucifer to your favorite AMD or Intel socket, a tube of thermal paste, a second set of fan clips, and a special spacer for socket 775 applications.
There’s also a nicely done user’s manual as well. Here’s a parting shot for this section of the Lucifer with its fan mounted in a push configuration. The Cooler Master Hyper 612 PWM is another article on CPU Cooler which may you with your search.
Closer look
The Lucifer has a unique mounting system that I have not come across before. The first step is to install the silver stud through the backing plate in the required position. When it is fully seated, the stud will be held nicely into the back plate like so. Then you slide this rubber spacer over the stud and back plate to hold everything in place.
Once you have all four done you’ll have a ready-to-mount back plate as shown above. Use caution when installing the back plate as there is a required up and downside on our Intel board as denoted by the two screw holes up top and a single screw hole on the bottom. Installation can get a little tricky here as you’ll need to hold the back plate while installing the four spacers onto the studs as shown.
Once you get all four nuts started, you can take your hand off the back plate and tighten them securely. Next, you apply your favorite thermal paste (or use the included paste if you so choose) and mount the cooler using its crossbar.
You can see here that RAM clearance isn’t a huge issue as the fan doesn’t have a single mounting position. You can just mount the fan a few mm higher on the cooler to clear your RAM. On the flip side, you can mount the fan on the back side of the cooler in a pull configuration and clear all your RAM. Forget using your first PCI(E) slot though; the Lucifer firmly blocks that just enough to make it unusable.
Now I ran the cooler on the bench with the fan, then removed the fan and tested its passive performance. Under stock clocks it managed to actually do pretty well passively; however, under a 4.5GHz OC, it failed miserably, hitting Tj MAX in less than five minutes. Notably, it’s designed to run passively on lower-end CPUs such as the i3 series that have a lower TDP than our 77W i7-3770k.
Overview
However, I got to thinking and realized that on the bench there was no airflow at all over the cooler. So I decided to install it into a case (a Cooler Master Cosmos SE – look for the review on that soon), so it would have the typical airflow from the case fans which would more closely simulate real-world usage.
Check out the results below. On the bench, the Lucifer in passive mode was able to keep the 3770k just a few degrees under its Tj Max and kept it from throttling down. In the Cosmos SE however (with 2x120mm intakes and a 120mm and 140mm exhaust) the temps dropped considerably just from having the case fans moving air.
The bench with its fan installed proved to be the best configuration and resulted in some very nice temps coming in less than 2ºC shy of the best on our list. The Lucifer’s fan is almost dead silent at idle and just barely audible under load at stock clocks. Let’s turn up the heat and see how she goes.
With a moderate OC to 4.5GHz, the Lucifer with its fan fell back just ever so slightly while in passive mode both in and out of the Cosmos SE it failed. On the bench, within five minutes it hit max and started to throttle while in the Cosmos SE, it took about 15 minutes to start throttling. Let’s wrap this review up with some final thoughts.
Conclusion
Deepcool has a great thing going on with Lucifer. The 140mm fan is near silent and the cooler performed very well.RAM clearance isn’t an issue but getting to your first PCI-e expansion slot is. If you’re looking for an inexpensive performer or a silent cooler for light-duty work, then Deepcool has you covered with the Lucifer.
