It’s always nice to see something pretty passing through our labs, and the Abkoncore Cool Storm T404 Hurricane Dual CPU Cooler is a delight. The smart RGB twin 120mm PWM fans with the company’s distinctive ‘arm’ bearing the company name surround a tallish black metal tower of well-separated fins – heat sink dimensions come in at 128 x 107 x 157mm. That fans are the easiest ever to attach and remove, perfect design.
And it all works well with one small exception – more of that in a moment.
We stuck it in to an Abkoncore tower case and found the RGB fans synced with the case hub without lifting a finger – we like that. It means we can get into playing with it so much faster. Those who like to tinker can use the hub remote control for all the usual adjustments.

So, back to the cooler, and our one moan. It’s the backplate, but once you know it all, it’s absolutely fine. But we did need to use the manual.
A cooler backplate goes on the back of the motherboard, surprise, surprise. Tiny pins with screwthreads then poke through to the ‘front’ of the board, and from there the cooler is connected to it using either standoffs, or screwing directly into the aforementioned backplate pins. This is direct screw, using screws held captive on hefty springs and we like that big time. So far, so good.

But it is those tiny pins. They come in the box already loose and are held in place on the backplate using plastic caps. As this cooler handles pretty much all modern Intel and AMD configurations, the pins go through a particular hole in the backplate. It’s fiddly. Too fiddly, and with a little more spent on having two backplates (one for Intel and another for AMD) it would have been so much easier.

But, as mentioned, once we had it all sussed, several installations later, it became easier. It’s just one more thing you have to learn before being able to use it. No biggie, but hey, it slowed us down a tad.
Once sitting on top of an Intel i5 8400, we ran a Prime95 stress test benchmark and the results were heart-warming. After 10-minutes on the default setting of mixed tests, the maximum temperature the processor rose to was 66-degrees celcius. That’s really good. You had to spread the Amkoncore thermal paste yourself – it was not already on the cooler, but that’s fine.
Happy with that – shows you can have decent cooling from a pretty device that costs around £35.

Time for some fun stats. The whole thing is 128 x 107 x 157mm, made from aluminium, so is nice and lightweight ar around 1kg; there are four 6mm heat pipes; uses hydraulic bearings; speed is 800 ± RPM (0-30%) – 1800 ± 10% RPM, airflow 50.2 CFM with a noise level of just 33.0 dB (A).
It is hard to argue with all that, considering the price. It also supports pretty much every chipset you can find in a modern day PC.
We love it – easy to fit thanks to those captive sprung screws that avoid putting excessive pressure on a single corner of the processor, and pretty darn efficient for all uses. Well worth checking out, again, considering that price. For more information, head over to the Abkoncore website.