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Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE CPU Air Cooler, PA120 SE, 6 Heat Pipes Cpu cooler, Dual 120mm TL-C12C PWM Fan, Aluminium Heatsink Cover, AGHP Technology, for AMD AM4/AM5 Intel 1700/1150/1200

£9.9£99Clearance
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Radiators marketed as "360mm" may sound better than those "280mm," but this naming scheme only takes into account the combined length of the fans, and ignores their width. Spinning at the same speed, two 140mm fans will cool almost as well as three 120mm ones, while making less noise, being easier to maintain, and fitting into cases with 5.25" bays. To test the limits of a cooler's thermal dissipation capabilities, I run two primary stress tests: Cinebench and OCCT, each for 10 minutes. While this may be a short amount of time, it is sufficient to push most coolers–air and liquid–to their limits. I'll be testing Thermalright’s Peerless Assassin 120 SE with Intel's Core i9-12900K. Due to the increased thermal density of the Intel 7 manufacturing process, as well as changes to core and component layouts, Alder Lake CPUs are more difficult to cool than previous generation CPUs in the most heat-intensive of workloads. If you’re not sure if you want to go the air cooling route (a big metal heatsink with fans) or opt for a liquid-cooled AIO (a pump attached to a radiator and fans), there are a few things to consider. Large air coolers tend to take up more internal space in your PC case, or at the very least they need more vertical clearance off your best motherboard, which can limit your case options. Air coolers can also be louder and less efficient than liquid coolers at moving heat away from your CPUand out of the chassis. These days, though, that’s not cut and dry. If you can go the extreme route, there are fanless air cooling options like Noctua's Colossal NH-P1 as well for the ultimate truly silent cooling option, although you'll still need case fans to move the warmed air out of your case. Due to requests from our readers, I’ve begun to include 95W results, which should be broadly applicable to CPUs like AMD’s Ryzen 5 5600V or Intel’s Core i5-12400. In these lower wattage tests, the Peerless Assassin once again lives up to its name, outperforming it’s nearest rival by six degrees C when fans ran at the default fan curve, and a whopping 12 degrees C when set to 50% fan speeds.

Generally speaking, the more powerful your CPU is, the bigger and better cooler you'll need. This will vary across architectures depending on how efficient they are, how many cores, and at what frequencies your CPU runs. If your desktop PC needs a lot of power and you travel with it, you're likely to feel safer with a radiator that's attached to your case via 8 or 12 screws than with a huge chunk of metal hanging off your motherboard. While stress testing in Cinebench, I run both with power limits removed and with an enforced 200W CPU power limit, using MSI’s Z690 A Pro DDR4 Motherboard and Be Quiet’s Silent Base 802 Computer Case. Only the most capable coolers are able to pass Cinebench testing when power limits are removed. Tier 1: These coolers are able to keep the i9-12900K below TJ max in most loads, with no power limits enforced. I expect only the best liquid coolers to meet this standard.Tier 3: These coolers are able to keep the i9-12900K under TJ max with CPU power limits of 140W enforced. Testing Methodology In all but the most demanding scenarios, the Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 and its almost identical SE version will perform just as well as the best CPU coolers on the market, while remaining just as quiet, for less than half the price. Where things get really interesting with the Peerless Assassin 129 SE is in lower wattage loads. In fact, I had to retest these results multiple times because I couldn’t believe my own results. When limited to 140W and with fans running at the default fan curve, the Peerless Assassin SE outperformed every cooler I’ve tested – including many high-end AIOs. At 140W with fans reduced to 50% speeds, Thermalright’s cooler tied with BeQuiet’s Pure Loop 2 FX and Cougar’s Poseidon GT360 AIOs for the best cooling performance. 95W OCCT Test Results

No responsibility is taken for the correctness of this information. The listed offers do not constitute legally binding advertising claims of the merchants. Another reason to use water cooling is if you have a slim case that doesn't have the space for a larger air cooler, or even for a fan near the CPU. On the other hand, a pump is much harder to replace than a fan if it broke, and while rare, the possibility of leaks within an electronic device can be scary. Regardless of which type of cooler you need, this guide will cover many great options at every size and price point.This means that coolers that kept previous-gen products like the i9-10900K nice and cool sometimes struggle to keep Intel's i9-12900K under Tj max–the maximum temperature before the CPU starts to throttle. Many coolers, air coolers in particular, fail to keep the i9-12900K under TJ max when power limits are removed in workloads like Cinebench and OCCT when I’ve tested them, including many coolers I previously considered top of the line. With OCCT, Thermalright’s Peerless Assassin SE continued to deliver outstanding results. While it wasn’t able to pass 200W with reduced fan speeds in this scenario, at the default fan curve it averaged 64 degrees C over ambient – once again degrees C cooler than DeepCool’s AK500! Thermalright's Peerless Assassin 120 SE lives up to its name, delivering the best performance from an air cooler that we've tested on Intel's Alder Lake at a price that undercuts the competition. In our tests, it performed so well when cooling our Core i9-12900K that we re-tested it multiple times to be sure the results were correct. The Peerless Assassin 120 SE cooled the CPU when it was drawing over 200 watts better than our tested competition, and at lower thermal/TDP settings, it performed much better than the competition.

Remember that, all else being equal, more fans equals better cooling, but more noise. The coolers that do the best job of moving warm air away from your CPU and out of your case are also often the loudest. If fan noise is an issue for you, you’ll want a cooler that does a good job of balancing noise and cooling. If you can set your cooler's fan speeds based on temperatures in your motherboard's BIOS, that should also help. Tier 2: These coolers are able to keep the i9-12900K under the TJ max threshold with CPU power limits of 200W enforced. I expect most liquid coolers and the best air coolers to meet this standard.

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