DeepCool AK500 Air CPU Cooler Review

A Closer Look

Out of the box the DeepCool AK500 presents itself well with a nice sleek and stylish aesthetic initially catching your attention. With silver on black, it looks fantastic and also has a nice satisfyingly weighty in the hand suggesting that the components are of good quality.

Being a high-performance air cooler, it clearly shouldn’t come as any surprise to learn that the DeepCool AK500 isn’t exactly on a diet. With that being said though, at just over 4½ in width, this isn’t exactly a fatty either meaning that unless you have some exceptionally chunky/tall RAM modules, compatibility shouldn’t represent any kind of problem!

In terms of aesthetics, DeepCool has kept things nice and simple with a sleek and stylish black-on-silver design. The black cap on the radiator and black fan contrasting against the silver fins look really fantastic and prove that not only can air CPU coolers look great, but they can do it without having to rely on ARGB lighting!

Taking a closer look at the top of the DeepCool AK500, while hard to capture in a photograph, the black does come with a nice patternation effect. Admittedly, in a case, and behind tempered glass, it probably won’t stand out too much. Again though, for a small touch, it really adds to how nice the DeepCool AK500 looks.

Contact Plate

The contact plate comes with 5 heat pipes which extend from each side into the radiator. With what appears to be nickel coating, this matches the stainless steel of the radiator very well to ensure the aesthetic isn’t unnecessarily broken.

The contact plate itself is both incredibly smooth and incredibly shiny. In terms of DeepCool, this might indicate that they’ve stepped production standards to a new higher tier as this is one of the best contact plates I’ve ever seen (on ANY CPU cooler). – Admittedly though, in terms of size, it just about has LGA1200 and AM5 well covered, but, at the same time, it doesn’t offer much wiggle room for those newer CPUs.

Radiator

The radiator is fairly standard, but I should note that in a really nice aesthetic touch, the outer edge (on the intended exposed side) has a nice pattern built into the fins. We’ve seen this before on DeepCool’s AK620 and we’re no less impressed with its implementation here on the AK500.

Fan

The cooling fan appears to be a fairly standard 120mm PWM design. With the DeepCool logo to the centre, however, it does at least add another small understated part to the overall aesthetic.

A huge plus factor is that the AK500 utilises a DeepCool-own cooling solution meaning that, all going well, it has been specifically designed (or chosen) to offer the best partnering performance.

Overall

I really like the DeepCool AK500. It has a somewhat simplistic nature, but there’s something about the design that suggests to me that this has been designed for high-performance but with a clear eye on a strong and sleek aesthetic. – And in regards to the aesthetics, DeepCool has undoubtedly done a fantastic job here.

How will it actually perform though? Well, firstly, we’ve got to get this fitted to our system. So let’s find out how that went!