Conclusion

With the Alpenföhn Nordwand, EKL presents a very powerful aircooler which is also very well manufactured and besides looks great. When the standard, blue illuminated fan is mounted you get an enormeous cooling capacity which easily keeps even todays hottest CPUs at adequate temperatures.

Reflecting the mounting process, EKL developed it over the time with every cooler they presented until they now come up with a solution which is suitable for this very good cooler. By using a multi-socket-backplate which has holes in different positions for the divers sockets available on the market it is possible to mount the cooler quickly and tight on all the recent sockets. Furthermore two fans can be installed on the cooler by using rubber spacers which can be slid into the coolers fins easily.

If you drive the fan with 12 volts it is subjectively audible and it comes with a huge cooling capacity. As we drove the fan at 5 Volts with only 700 rotations per minute resulting we could see that the performance decreased quite clearly. EKL itself recommends using a fan with no less than 800 rotations per minute. This because of the reason that the Nordwand's Design is optimized for fans with relatively high airflow resulting from the fins which are quite close to eachother. On the other hand if you drive the fan at 700 rpm it is subjectively very silent.

With the Alpenföhn Nordwand EKL designed a CPU-tower-cooler which really convinces. Therefore it doesn't matter if we look at cooling capacity, noise level oder design, just in every point the Nordwand is very good. As a hardware magazine having its headquarters in Switzerland we have to mention that on the package the cooler comes with, there really should be the Nordwand (Eiger Nordwand) and not the Matterhorn

You can buy the Alpenföhn Nordwand at Digitec.ch to a price of CHF 79.- (EUR 53.-).