Performance
This is a compact single-tower cooler with a single fan, and of course, it’s also quite affordable, so it’s not going to beat out the plethora of twin-fan air coolers or AIO coolers that we’ve had the pleasure of testing. With that in mind, yeah it’s quite far down the light, but on par with the be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 5 for cooling is not a bad place to be, and actually a little cooler than the fantastic MA 824 Stealth, AK 620 Digital, and even the Arctic Freezer 36, while being largely more affordable too. Optimised settings offered a fairly significant improvement too, and while the idle temperatures were higher, the load temperatures were good enough to just slightly beat out the Noctua NH-U12A; a similarly sized single fan cooler, but much more expensive.
Acoustics are very good, but then again, they would be, given that it’s just a single fan; it makes less noise than many of the double or triple-fan coolers we have on our charts. That being said, this fan can spin pretty darn fast, which is why its tiny size can handle some higher TDP CPUs. But even then, I don’t think the noise was unreasonable given I’m trying to cool an i9 with a single 120mm fan. Albeit, I’d be more inclined to use this on something like a Ryzen 5, or maybe a Ryzen 7, or equivalent like an Intel i5, or i7, which have more attainable TDP and would obviously be easy work for a smaller cooler like this.
