I just bought the Peerless Assassin and the lga 1700 frame based on these positive reviews for a 13700k. Might upgrade to an AiO later and see If Thermalright offers anything.
I had athlon and athlonXp thermalright coolers in the 90s. Some of the best at the time but super loud server fans made them too loud in comparison to today's coolers.
I bought the Peerless Assassin on your recommendation to replace my 240mm aio after the pump failed and it is fantastic. Great value for money, quiet very cool. Looks great in white too. Thanks for the review. 👏
Damn! I thought I had locked my air cooler for my new build this summer. Now I have to hunt down a Thermalright Frost Spirit. You and Gamers Nexus are the top 2 reviewers for coolers and fans. They're soo good. And I can't believe Noctua and Be Quiet are draging their feet with updates for their flagship cooles leaving the power vacuum up for grabs for everyone else. I'm loving the competition though.
I mean, they're literally 2 degrees of at maximum. On a 10 year old design against far newer ones. That's hardly 'feet dragging', that's rather commendable at the least.
@@xxx_rayI was one of the fortunate ones able to get one. I haven’t made my system yet, but it’ll be interesting whether it really performs as well in reality as on paper
Noctua NH-D15 was relased April 8th 2014. Nine years later its still fighting for 2nd best spot in performance. It costs a lot, but Noctua has committed to essentially lifetime support with free adapters and free posting, for newer CPU mounts
@@palmsa4363 There are other coolers essentially tying with NH-D15 on these tests, but there is nothing clearly beating it. When one adds the quality and longevity of the the fans in NH-D15, it is one hell of a product. Anyhow, these Thermalright coolers look nice for many builds. If one ends up having to replace the fans, then the value-calculus changes somewhat though and they do not beat quite that much on the value front.
I couldn't find that many comparisons between the Frost Spirit, Frost Commander, or even the Frost Tower so this is very useful. This would've been better for me two weeks ago as I ended up with the Frost Commander but fantastic job.
Thank you SO much for this video!! This is EXACTLY the stuff us consumers need when looking for pc components! I bought a frost spirit, and could not possibly be more excited to run it in my system!
The quality and depth of your review is really impressive. It must have taken a tremendous effort doing all that testing, validation and analysis to put together a video that is so well thought out and can somehow strike the perfect balance and be extensive yet concise at the same time. Thank you for the hard work and a great review.
By far my favorite videos on this channel. This guy does great work in being informative and explaining it well to someone like me that isnt super knowledgeable about coolers
As a bonus, it would be useful to test all these coolers from arctic p12 or noctua a12x25 to show the efficiency of the coolers themselves under identical cooling conditions. Great job!
I picked up FS140 v1 ( silver and different cover plate ) for 25 euro a while ago and its doing a grand job on my 13700K. I also bought the FC140 just a week ago, and found the same results as you. Same temps with more noise. Its returned. I would always buy Thermalright over Deepcool since Deepcool mounting hardware is kinda soft chinasteel tm and easy to strip.
@@ej1025 Good to hear, I was considering getting it for a future 5800X3D upgrade. I would love to see how it stacks up to the cpu coolers in the video.
Dude these reviews are so goddamn detailed, I am loving your methodology, comparing every single aspect from temps to clocks to FPS and blending it all together. So great!
I like how the noctua D15 is still the best despite how old it allready is. Rarely is there a new air cooler that can match it. I have changed 3 pcs so far and have kept my D15 through all and just ordered a new mouting for the new sockets. In my mind Noctua may be pricier but it's performance is almost unmatched and their customer support and product support all the way back to oldest coolers and fans is superb.
That is not what I got out of the video, what I got was that once you get past the around $40 mark every cooler performs about the same, most coolers can keep a CPU below the 100 C thermal limit and if it is under that limit the CPU will be able to perform at its maximum rated speed.
D15 isn't a bad product, it's just unacceptably overpriced for the current market. When it came out it was dope, I love mine, but nowadays I cannot in good faith recommend it to anyone when the Peerless Assassin 120 SE is like $30
@@heisen1815 sure, you have a point. Though i have mine since 2015 with original fans and will ise it until they keep providing mounting hardware for new sockets so it it well worth it. What other brand supports their products for this long?
I'd love to see more cooler reviews, these are great! The cheaper deepcool models would be interesting; the AK500, AK400, and the plus version of the AK400 with two fans. I especially want to see how the AK500 compares to the AK620.
im running the ak400 dual fan version and its more than enough for the 5800x3d. with an undervolt i dont get over 81c (21c ambient temp) at max load in cinebench.
We needed this overview so much. Thank you for listening to the suggestions. Surprising results for FC140. I assume the fin density also has some impact. Anyway the FS140 and PA120 are neck and neck so everyone can choose what works best for them.
Great review!! ONE PROBLEM: It's really hard to get the Frost Spirit 140 with the 1700 mounting solution. I think you need the "V3" version for that, or their adapter. Amazon sells the old version and the adapter - if you don't mind waiting TWO WEEKS for delivery. And Newegg sells the V3 versions for $96 - 131 ! Which is insane. Even with NewEgg you have to wait weeks for delivery. All my other parts will be here in days.
The Prosiphon Elite fits nicely into a Fractal Torrent, where the rear fan pulls the hot air from between it and the GPU, while the power supply pulls out the hot exhaust from it while the cold air from the front bolsters the overall flow from front to back
Snagged a peerless assassin for about 35 bucks the other day. Seeing where it stands on these charts makes me confident that was a good choice. I've got a hyper 212 evo rgb black edition I bought for about 30 bucks five years ago that is selling for around 50 now which is mind boggling to me.
Been using the cheap Peerless Assassin as a temporary solution until some newer (aesthetically pleasing) and probably more expensive coolers come out (deep cool's upcoming coolers for example), but so far its been great. Its always good to have a few air coolers on hand for when you need them.
Upgraded my hyper 212 to the peerless assassin SE, but swapped out the fans with my noctua nf-p12. Runs solid just faster equilibrium of room temp from what I noticed
I used a Peerless Assassin 120 on my 7700X and it was perfectly fine. Swapped to a 280 RGB Mirror from Coolermaster, just because I got one last Christmas for $60. No real difference in day to day gaming.
Thank you for awesome work with testing all that coolers. Great that you don't stop with that and announced new edition of your "cooler than air" series. Greetings
I was amazed at the Deepcool. Deepcool! But still happy to see Thermalright flexing its muscles. I have a strong aversion to anything exorbitantly expensive and I detest laptops or anything smaller than a mid tower, but I'm going to have to bite the bullet and turn on all notifications just so I don't miss another of your videos. Great job as usual and we all appreciate your hard work.
If you don't mind adding another Thermalright to the list I'd like to see you test the Phantom Spirit. It seems to be the Peerless Assassin but with one more heat pipe. The heat pipes are the same diameter between the two so I'm curious if the greater density of pipes over the hot spot helps.
I'm so happy to see this! If I believed the rest of the internet, I would have to buy a 360 or 420 aio because apparently nothing else can cool the 13900k. I was out of hope. Now I'm gong to go with one of these, for sure! Thank you!
You have a great channel my man. I bought 2 of the Thermalrite FS140’s because of this review and yes……I’m impressed. Chose to not use an AIO on a 5800x3d and instead used the FS140. Performs flawlessly at 100% load. Max temp of 81C after 4 hours.
Now this is the type of stuff I love to see, especially ID.Cooling. You should put the 224 XT V2 out there aswell, since it has the same performance as Noctua, if coulped with better fans (on single die Ryzen chips)!
I have a thermalright frost spirit 140 white argb on a 5900x on an x470-f gaming mobo. Does a great job at keeping things fairly cool considering the 12 cores and the power this thing pulls. I have brand new chipset drivers, and I’m running the usual amd auto overclocking. While gaming I get about 60-75c, depending on the game. In minecraft, spawning in and 28 chunks all at the same time makes it spike to 77c but doesn’t last long. Then the rest of the gaming experience is below 70c. Warzone 2 sits at 65-70c. EA WRC sits at 60-65c. Gaming pulls about 100-150 watts at 4.9ghz boosts. Cinebench r23 gets up to 88c in a multicore 10 minute run. I have custom fan curves, so everything stays really quite. Even at 100%, the fans aren’t obnoxious, if someone has headphones in you would never hear them. It might be annoying if they are full blast while using a microphone without noise suppression. First air cooler, and might be the last.
From the intro I was sweating that my precious D15 was going down without a fight, but thankfully it's still hanging in there. Costs a lot, but not out of the game yet. It's so satisfying having a bunch of coolers shown off, even though I can barely make out the charts, being red-green color blind.
I personally got myself the Scythe Fuma 2 on a Ryzen 7 3700X and yes it's an easy CPU to cool but the fans never spin above 500RPM and the temps never get above 55'C. Also it's quite cheap.
What an awesome review, I can barely imagine how much work this took, wow! And to finish with the OGs Damn Good awards, icing on the cake! Thanks for the great video!
My experience with Zen 3 is different than with other CPUs. For instance the Noctua U14S doesn't make very good contact with it and it doesn't do a great job pulling heat away and I get higher temps with it that with the Thermalright Peerless Assassin which keeps the Zen 3 CPUs I've tested under control. I'm going to have to test how the Deepcool Assassin 3 and the Thermalright Frost Spirit do when Zen 3, along with their 120mm single tower solutions for something like the 5600
6:58 Of all the aircooler review videos I watched, this was the last one that addressed this issue. Congratulations on your work and also my suggestion: it would be great to see a comparison of how different coolers behave with different processors (Ryzen Chiplets, 3D V-Cache, Intel Hybrid CPUs, etc.). I want to see if Thermalright PA120 and FS140 can repeat these good results regardless of the situation or if it was a "lucky break".
Thanks for being consistent and enthusiastic about CPU cooling. If i can give you guys-team hardware canucks advice, please highlight the name of cooling on the right side not just the graph because some of your fans and community may have parcial color-blind Thanks!
Making graphs…since there is a limit to colors looking distinctly unique (i.e. easy to pick out from the pack) when displaying many data sets, adding various line types with the colors can change a jumble into distinct sets. Dashes, dot-dashes, etc. can help a lot to help the colors pop.
I'm after (quite setup) on 13600k + 3080TI. so wonder what way Air cooling with Frost Spirit 140 or water cool it together with GPU on a couple 280mm rads...
I am using deepcool assassin 3 it's just awesome. I am using it on 1stly i7 9700k but after dieing that cpu , intel gave me i7 11700k . Currently I am using it. With noctua thermal paste.😊
I always love your air cooler reviews, especially those regarding ID-COOLING which is widely available here in Singapore. I would like to request, if possible, a chart regarding the respective air coolers price-to-performance at the end to let us know which may be the best value in ranking depending on our regions. Keep up the good work and have a wonderful day! 🤗
I was thinking of that but when it comes to a lot of these coolers their prices vary wildly from one region to another so doing the calculation with USD would be pointless for more than 50% of our audience.
@@HardwareCanucks I see, I honestly presumed that the majority of your demographics were US based. I guess y’all are internationally exposed at this point. Keep up the awesome content. Cheers! 🤗
I loved this video! Thanks for pointing out the heat pipe positioning relative to the cpu's ihs. Definitely something that I'm going to check when I'm searching for a under the radar crazy good air cooler :D The big question now is indeed, how good is the Noctua's next-gen D-15 going to be? Hopefully they will release it at the end of the year unless they're going to postpone it again. Crazy to think that it has taken Noctua's competitors so long to get on bar with the performance of D14/D15! Despite that, very exciting time to be shopping for a new air cooler!
The fs140 and fc140 seem reminiscent of the nh-d14 with tve biggest difference being the number of heatpipes. Would like to see thermalright make a duak 140mm tower cooler to compete directly with the nh-d15.
I would love to see the thermalright coolers put on a 5950x to see if the chiplet design changes what's going on. gamers nexus has reported their mounting mechanism is prone to give inconsistent pressure (see the peerless assassin video), so that could also be what's going on with the FS140 vs FC140. I can only find the FS140 shipped from china for $75 USD, i might just give up and get the Peerless Assassin 120 for my AM4 server.
For some reason, this is the only video on youtube comparing the Frost spirit 140 to anything. I tried looking for one and everything is Frost Commander 140 or Frost spirit 120.
Love Mike and his air coolers reviews ! I am really enjoying thermal right products ! Love their designs price and performance, I have a noctua redux ATM and it's enough but next time I build a pc I will definitely check thermal right options !
Wonder how this reasoning carries over to AM5? Supposedly due to the CCD/IO die vs heatpipe positioning, the relative performance between these coolers on AM5 could be different? Might need a whole new video?
Finally found the video i needed to decide which cooler to buy! Right now in Canada the thermalright coolers are about $1-7 difference so it just a matter which one is the best of them all. I have 4 noctuas i’ve been collecting whenever i see a sale price, 2x 120mm, 140mm and a 200mm fan. I’ll be using them so noise will be minimal. Edit: just added to my cart discounted FS140 for $40! Cheapest color. I’ll just vinyl wrap the top if i decide to care how inside my PC looks!
Love seeing the PA120 performing so well against bigger, more expensive air coolers. Value king. Tr needs to get the black version back in stock. I'd be interested in the Frost Spirit if I could find the black version anywhere in the States with reasonable pricing.
And it's even better if you use larger clips and throw a couple 140 high pressure fans on it. It can cool at silent levels like it could with 120s at louder levels. I've got it dropped on an AMD 5800X, everclocked to 5+ghz, and even in a case with suboptimal airflow, it's never breaking 76c in 30 minute CB23 stress testing. Rock solid and very quiet when gaming.
What's amazing to me is how good the Noctua NH d-15 is despite being a relatively old design. While I probably won't buy it as my current d-15 is simply more than good enough for me, I'm excited to see how the design its successor.
This result is wrong, an deepcool as500 beat the noctua d15 because of the orientation of the base and with less pipes. The d15 is not the best, it is wrong assumption. The best is also not the biggest with highest pipes. The orientation of the base and pipes contact are forgotten. Dual tower are not the best to cool recent processor dual ccd. Single tower as500 do s better result
@@CC-gt3ro you might be correct. However, i've never even come close to saturating my nh d-15 and won't worry about replacing it until that becomes a concern.
Great review! As an idea, having a reference 360mm AIO like a Corsair iCUE Elite Capellix XT to compare to the air coolers would be a nice addition. Also I'd like to a short chapter about RAM clearance. I'm currently rocking a Noctua NH-U12S Chromax and besides the U12A Chromax I don't see many options to upgrade if I want to keep a good view of my 4 RGB dimms.
Thermalright makes some of the best budget coolers. I used the AXP-120-67 in a SFF build with 5800X3D and it does amazing in a case most only use with water cooling.
Great content and testing, thermal right is beating the competition right now, hope the maintain the regular prices and not like Noctua exageratedly high prices
The reason the pro siphon isnt doing as well, is because you dont have the unreleased copper version that is designed for large single core. You have the pre 7000 serise AMD designed cooler essentially. I wonder if you tried the new bequiet fans you guys rated highly or the t30 on the ice giant you have. Regardless you should reach out to ice giant and ask them for the prototype copper version that Linus tested and try that one out.
Just note that that FS140 you used is newer V3 black version(2021), the cheaper FS140 linked in the description is the first version(2019). Not sure what's the difference for the v3 but the first version was notorious for bad quality control with crooked heatpipes.
IceGiant showed off their Copper prototype on LTT like what two years ago now? And has been radio silent since; a damn shame, because the copper's performance was insane
@@MichaelBertolino you do know we had a thing that ruined small businesses and the supply chain in general the last 3 years. Just saying. Now we have issues with inflation.
@@tacticalcenter8658 Yeah, I do know, but their communications have been radio silent since. It's better to have updates providing insight, if there is any, rather than ghosting people who were interested in your product
Truly truly great content on these coolers. I love especially that you ask "why" when there is an unexpected result and ask manufacturers for their explanation. And sort of hinting us with what's to come from the big incumbents Noctua and Be Quiet to respond to this situation and new CPUs. I wonder how they will respond to Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake?! Seems like the future is in so much flux. But we already have great coolers now, so as a consumer I feel like we're in a really great spot! (And I wouldn't know the half of it if I didn't watch your, and now Gamers Nexus' videos about this stuff, as well as a few smaller channels covering this exciting value air cooler market.) So... all that to say... thanks for this review content! Love to see it. P.S. your gaming cooling results are such a reality check. Basically any cooler will do, it's just if you can tolerate higher temps or higher noise or whatever. It's a low-stakes choice you can make based on budget or aesthetics, really. For a render farm, it's different. Again, performance is virtually the same, especially if you limit wattage, but again, heat, noise, aesthetics. It's up to us buyers to make that decision. Your videos help so much to know what we're getting for our purchase!!! Thanks.
Thanks for the feedback....honestly air cooling is something I'm passionate about. Maybe a bit too much. A lot of that is due to me getting royally pissed seeing AMD recommending ridiculous and needlessly expensive AIOs for their 5000 series CPUs. It sorta spurred me into action. This is the end result - Mike
@@HardwareCanucks (I typed a super long reply here, but in summary, I basically think good reviews help consumers spend well, learn about new tech, and help companies improve, so in that case I hope the passion is worth it!! Thanks again!) --- Well, if it takes passion to do these reviews, I can definitely say we all appreciate it. If many people are spending $50-$100 on their cooling or even more, and up to $1000's on their whole PC build, I think it does a lot to help people spend their money well. Whether it be CPU, GPU reviews, cases, fans, coolers. I really think it rewards manufacturers for making the better product at the better price, too. Good reviewers inform the people, which in turn gives companies a reason to improve. Because if the product is the best, people will know based on the facts (performance and quality) from watching the reviews. Otherwise we might all still be buying Hyper 212's, or spending big on a Noctua D-15 "just in case" since we don't know if it'll help or not. But people wouldn't know there was anything better (or better perf/dollar) without reviews. So maybe manufacturers would make something new, it wouldn't sell, and they'd go "why bother? the old cooler with name recognition sells more." And the tech could stagnate. (Tangent: The cooling/power/heat situation this gen is weird, because *if* high temps could cause some issue with part longevity (maybe cooking mobo components??), I feel like we maybe won't know for a few years still. But the CPUs themselves are rated for it, and perf is so close to 100%... I dunno, just strange how little the CPU manufacturers explained this to people. And yeah, beefier coolers keep temps lower, but... Almost no perf difference? It'd be nice for intel and AMD to admit their un-capped power is overkill and apply reasonable wattage limits out of the box, and maybe recommend people apply wattage limits tuned to their workload needs to achieve ideal efficiency. Or even undervolting, seems like people get a lot out of undervolting these days. I guess they just want to look marginally better in benchmarks, and not risk falling behind the other team on charts while their next gen is still being worked on to deliver proper real technology gains.) Anyway, I think passion is better than being bored! But thank you to you all. Love the channel. Best regards.
Weird I got opposite results between the Frost commander and the frost spirit. But the black and white version of the frost commander that I used are also the newest revisions over the old gray model. They go on sale for 45$ dollars so often they are a great deal.
Thank you. Good review. But for comparison, it was necessary to add a high-quality AIO. Arctic Freezer II 280 for example. I also really want to see these models with the same high-quality 120 and 140 mm fans in order to understand how good the radiators themselves are in each of the models. In the last build I installed Peerless Assassin 120 with two fans Arctic 12 Max in a Cooler Master NR200P case with air intake from the back and was able to achieve excellent maximum 80℃ at 200W at 13700k with undervolt in AIDA64 FPU and RTX 4090 Palit Gamerock with up to 320W undervolt and max 4% performance drop in Superposition 8K. Noise at a distance of 30 cm from the case was a maximum of 38 dB with 1600 rpm fan speed. Previously, I installed Arctic P12 PWM PST and Noctua A12-25 fans in assemblies, and Thermalright Silver Arrow was my last cooler from Thermalright. So thank you very much for your quality reviews, after which I purchased this cooler with these fans.
Our AIO methodology is still being worked on and I don't want to include one until we are 10000% sure its testing will withstand both internal and external scrutiny.
