Raijintek Aidos CPU Cooler Review

Final Thoughts

Price

Raijintek knocked it out of the park with the Aidos price, with it clocking in at under £20 from most major retailers, and that’s a deal that’s pretty hard to ignore. It’s almost 50% cheaper than the closely comparable Cooler Master 212X and that means more money in your wallet to give to Gaben in the next Steam sale.

Overview

The Raijintek Aidos is hardly their greatest cooler when it comes to performance, in fact, the performance by its self is pretty underwhelming. On a non-overclocked CPU it does a pretty good job of keeping things cool and quiet, but virtually any CPU cooler should at least do that much. While overclocked, it actually held up to a fairly significant amount of punishment given its size and the level of overclock and voltages we test on, it was a little loud, but it got the job done and that’s pretty commendable. The real interesting part, however, is that it is significantly cheap, and smaller, that all the other coolers it matched up with in terms of performance, making this one of the best price vs performance budget coolers we’ve ever seen.

The build quality is decent enough, nothing too fancy, but it doesn’t need to be at this price range. It’s nicely finished though, with a fairly simple yet clean design, exposed heat pipes and a black fan; it’s not going to look out of place in most builds. It’s also quite small, which means that it’s going to have a lot of support for smaller chassis designs or any build that’s limited on space.

The mounting kit is easy enough to use, and while extra fan clips were included, I think a nice touch would have been to keep them all of the same design, but that’s hardly a deal breaker.

The cooler performance was good, and the acoustics weren’t bad either. It did get a little loud when overclocking, but with it being a smaller design, I would simply not overclock so hard and lower those RPM to find a nice balance. Raijintek make plenty of bigger coolers for overclocking, so it’s about buying what’s appropriate for your needs.

Pros

• Competitive performance for a budget cooler
• £10 cheaper than its next budget rival
• Easy to install
• Compact size
• Extra fan clips included
• Perfect for no/mild overclocks
• Low noise (stock loads)

Cons

• Fan can be noisy at high RPM

Neutral

• Matching set of extra fan clips would look better
• Not idea for heavier overclocks, not surprising given its relatively small size