Air Cooler Challenge – 7 Way Round-Up

1. Introduction2. Alpenfohn Atlas3. Alpenfohn Brocken ECO4. be quiet! Shadow Rock LP5. Cryorig M9a/M9i6. Deepcool Assassin II7. Phanteks PH-TC12DX8. Prolimatech Basic 819. Big Picture Overview10. Closing Thoughts11. View All Pages

In this round-up we are looking at seven air coolers that will work with pretty much any CPU. As you will see in our photos and video the coolers come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and the prices also cover a spread from about £20 all the way past £70. At the high end the Deepcool Assassin II costs more than a basic liquid cooler and takes up considerably more space around the CPU socket. Go to the other extreme and the Cryorig M9 is a compact tower that will fit inside your tower case with room to spare. 

In this round-up we are looking at seven air coolers that will work with pretty much any CPU. As you will see in our photos and video the coolers come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and the prices also cover a spread from about £20 all the way past £70.

At the high end the Deepcool Assassin II costs more than a basic liquid cooler and takes up considerably more space around the CPU socket. Go to the other extreme and the Cryorig M9 is a compact tower that will fit inside your tower case with room to spare.

We have listed the seven coolers in alphabetical order and might we suggest that you watch the video before you dive into the words and photos for further details.

We tested the coolers using two families of CPU. These are AMD AM3+ and Intel LGA2011, while ignoring LGA115x. The reason is that the AMD FX-8370 has a TDP rating of 125W and the Intel Core i7-4820K has a TDP of 130W so you are safe to assume that any cooler that can control those two processors at stock clocks will have no trouble with a 91W Core i7-6700K. Spoiler alert, all of the coolers managed that task without too much difficulty.

So what about overclockers who want to go way, way beyond 120W? For AMD we swapped out the 125W FX-8370 for a 220W FX-9590 that Turbos to 5GHz and on the Intel front we overclocked the Core i7-4820K to 4.5GHz using 1.4V.

FX-9590 and overclocked Core i7-4820K drew about 270W at the wall socket when the CPU was loaded (about 100W more than the baseline tests) which provided all the heat we needed to test the coolers, in some instances beyond their limits.

Now let's take a closer look at each cooler.

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