Fractal Design Kelvin S24 Expandable AIO CPU Cooler

Performance

Fractal Design have set out to create an AIO cooler that looks great and works well, but they also want it to have plenty of functionality. This can be seen with the expansion options that they have allowed, let’s hope the good looks and extra options don’t come at a cost.

At stock the cooler does well, it does fall behind quite a few other well-known AIO brands, this surprised me, the feeling of quality from the Kelvin S24 as well as the great looks just made me instantly think that it was going to be at the top of our list. It certainly doesn’t do badly, 25c delta under load is certainly a respectable temperature and it comes in the top 10 on our list.

When overclocked our processor gives out more heat and the Kelvin S24 deals with this fine. It does drop another place on our table but still, it’s a respectable score. I don’t think anyone could complain about a 38c delta temp at full load with a 4.5 GHz overclock; It certainly does its job.

When we get out our decibel reader, unfortunately the Kelvin S24 does let itself down somewhat. A reading of 42db under load means that this is one of the noisier products we have tested. This is down to the Alphacool DC-LT pump that is used rather than the fans which are almost silent. Due to the pump being ran off the fan header, they will be running at 12v as standard so I did try it at 9v too and it made it a lot quieter. This would mean you would be sacrificing some of the power of the pump though, this wouldn’t matter if you are just keeping it as a CPU cooler, but if you added a VGA block in also, you would want it running at 12v. This is the sacrifice that has had to be made to make this product have a powerful enough pump to ensure it can handle more components.

The same can be seen when our CPU is overclocked.