ID-Cooling SE-914-XT Basic CPU Cooler Review

A Closer Look

Out of the box, the ID-Cooling SE-914-XT Basic presents itself well for being a pretty substantial air-cooler, but not overly large or cumbersome either. In terms of size, it does appear to be a little bit slimmer than the vast majority of air cooling designs and, as such, RAM compatibility will undoubtedly not be an issue here.

How it looks as a whole, however, is certainly not indicative of the individual components. Let us, therefore, go in for a closer inspection!

Contact Plate

The contact plate has 4 pipes leading out from either side. These appear to be nickel-plated and, as such, should lead to a good strong level of heat dissipation throughout the radiator.

The contact plate is both nicely large and amazingly smooth and, as such, this should provide excellent coverage for both standard Intel and AMD processors. With the copper pipes exposed as well, this should hopefully lead to some excellent heat transfer from the CPU.

Radiator

As noted above, the radiator does appear, in general comparison to other air cooler designs, to be a little slimmer than usual. Don’t get us wrong though, it still appears more than chunky enough for the task at hand!

With a combination of black and silver, the radiator certainly makes up for the (perceived) lack of RGB eye-candy with a very sleek and professional appearance.

The radiator fans are well organised in a honey-comb style pattern. This is likely a very deliberate choice as it maximizes the surface area without having to compromise on size.

At the top of the radiator, you can see a smooth matte-black surface with the ID-Cooling logo to the centre, and following this color scheme through the fan, it certainly looks like a design that would suit being sat inside the vast majority of PC systems.

Fan

You are provided with 1 x 92mm cooling fan with the ID-Cooling SE-914-XT Basic which is indicative of just how reasonably compact this design is. And, as noted just above, the coloring of this has been made to match up with the cooler as a whole.

A closer look reveals this to be an ID-Cooling own design and, as such, this has hopefully been created (or utilized) to work in coordination with the cooler for some nice low temperatures while keeping the acoustic volumes at a reasonable level.

It should also be noted that in terms of coverage, this 92mm fan is absolutely perfect. With only minimal areas of the radiator not directly vented by the fan, this should, all going well, result in some decent temperature results in our testing.

Overall

Overall, we think the ID-Cooling SE-914-XT Basic presents itself as a very sleek and stylish cooler. Yes, many will always argue that air coolers are not the most attractive option out there and, to some extend, while we can’t necessarily agree, we can at least understand that sentiment.

For us though, the ID-Cooling SE-914-XT Basic manages to tick all of the right boxes with a design that would suit practically all systems or setups.