Final Thoughts
Price
The DeepCool Castle 280mm RGB Extreme AIO Liquid Cooler is available now for just £124.99. OK, so that’s a lot of money for a cooler, but it’s really quite competitive with other high-end products of this size. The addition of the stunning RGB fans and pump, the Threadripper support, the fan hub, and the RGB cable controller all help sweeten the deal too. Furthermore, a three year warranty should keep you covered too.
Overview
There’s a lot to love about the latest cooler from DeepCool, and a few issues too, albeit nothing I would call a deal breaker. For example, it’s a pretty big cooler, and while many chassis support 280mm radiators, it’s not as easy as you think. Quite often, the radiator support conflicts with motherboard components, PSU cables, and more. Usually, sticking with 240mm is the safe choice. However, if you do have a big chassis, the improved surface area and larger fans can reap huge cooling rewards.
Pump
The pump is properly fantastic, with its chrome mirror finish that fades to a sea of colour once powered on. It’s also remarkable how quiet it is. It is quite tall though, making it a little cumbersome to install, but far from impossible. I do like that it’s easy to change the mounting bracket though, and the TR4 kit was very easy to use.
Performance
The Castle 280mm made light work of both our Threadripper CPUs, more so than I expected it would if I’m honest. The cooler was excellent, the noise levels were low, and you couldn’t really ask for much more. At this price range, is very competitive. Of course, dropping £125 on a cooler is nothing when you’re dropping £1000 on an extreme CPU; a quality cooler will keep your CPU investment safer than ever.
Should I Buy One?
Sure, we tested with Threadripper, but it’ll still cool all major Intel and AMD desktop CPUs too. If it can do this good on a massive TR4 chip, it should make light work of standard Ryzen CPUs an Intel 8th Gen hardware, for example. It’s not cheap, but it is very competitive, and you’ll struggle to find something that looks this good, is this cool, this quiet, and with this many extra features for the same money or less.
