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The chassis fans are disabled, all case panels are on, and the sound meter is placed 12 inches from the side of the Fractal chassis’ glass side panel – roughly where a desk user will be sat.
Overall, a reasonably straightforward installation process, but the attachment method for the central fan could do with improvement. G.SKILL takes the place as the loudest cooler in this test. Realistically though, the 50dBA and above AIOs are loud to the point where you would certainly want to tune the fan speed away from 100% for general operation. The AS500 Plus White has a white color top cover with low-profile digital RGB lighting under the hood. The A-RGB lighting is compatible with: Evidently, though, there is an argument that the AIOs are simply forcing their way to the top of the chart with higher-speed and louder fan solutions. We will have to wait until our 40dBA testing to see how the situation changes. G.SKILL highlights higher radiator density as one of the Enki’s key features. The horizontal radiator pipes are spaced approximately 6mm apart which is denser than the competing AIO coolers we are looking at in this test. To power air through this dense fin array are 3 120mm, 9-bladed fans that operate at up to 2100 RPM using a 4-pin PWM connector.
Test Results – Intel
The 360mm AIOs, yet again, steal the show here. This is thanks to their abilities to move the concentrated heat load away from the Ryzen CPU whilst also dissipating the energy across a large surface area with high-speed fans. The DeepCool and Cooler Master units fair particularly well, thanks in large to both coolers opting for modest speed 140mm fans. Noctua also falls into that category. Note the use of delta temperature data in our charts and factor in your own ambient conditions for reference. We have to deal with 11 components in total to mount the installation kit. Effective from this content, we will not be giving detailed installation steps as the user guide is there to cover it. Clearance The Cougar Aqua 240 ARGB also deserves mention as the budget-orientated unit performed well in our testing. Yes, a significant chunk of this model’s price tag is spent on flash RGB lighting. But there is good performance to boot, so perhaps that will appeal to many.
The two fans are from Arctic’s higher-end P-series range and are clearly optimised for high-pressure performance as indicated by the blade sweep. The front 120mm unit is rated at 200-1800 RPM. The centre 140mm fan is rated at 200-1700 RPM. Both fans clearly offer a good range of speed operation. Deepcool has provided a dedicated controller with the cooler. The controller is using a proprietary 3-pin connector for the cable coming from the heatsink. The controller is SATA powered. DeepCool AS500 Plus Controller The 240mm AIO coolers and IceGiant ProSiphon Elite all perform very similarly with real temperature levels running at 90C or just above. While it is expensive, I have to give IceGiant a fair deal of credit here. The ProSiphon Elite is matching 240mm liquid coolers even when its particularly dense fin array is hampered by reduced fan speeds. Plus, I also think it’s reasonable to re-emphasise that this thermosiphon cooler is designed for significantly higher heat loads than the sub-250W figure that we are throwing at it.This noise-normalised test is perhaps a little unfair towards AIO liquid coolers and air CPU coolers with dense fin arrays. Those designs need high pressure fans to penetrate the dense arrays and this usually comes in the form of high-speed and loud fans. The 120 MP fans feature 7 white blades for an aesthetically pleasing appearance but do not have any form of RGB lighting. Performance of the fans is 500-2200 RPM using a 4-pin PWM connector. Phanteks smartly pre-routes the short fan cables allowing them to be daisy-chained to one another. This is superb as it only requires one motherboard fan header (plus another for the pump) and it eases the cable management burden. The AS500 Plus White has a height of 164mm making it compatible with most of the mid-tower chassis out there if not all. It has zero RAM incompatibility and no interference for the first x6 PCIe slot. As can be seen in the picture, the heatsink has no RAM clearance issue. DeepCool AS500 Plus Clearance
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