Q&A
What is an all-in-one
liquid cooler?
These coolers offer the basic
properties of liquid cooling
but in a self-contained unit.
A CPU/water block mounts
to the CPU while a pair of
pipes feed water to and from
a radiator where the heat is
drawn out from the liquid.
Which CPUs do liquid
coolers support?
All of the coolers on test
support all AMD Ryzen and
Intel socket 1151 CPUs.
They’re also compatible with
all Intel 2066/2011 CPUs,
but some wouldn’t be
recommended for use with
the most powerful
processors in those lineups
as they simply don’t have the
cooling power.Do they need filling?
These coolers ship
prefilled and most are never
meant to be refilled.
However, some do include a
means of emptying and
refilling the coolers.How much better are they?
For reference, we also tested
our 1800X with AMD’s
Wraith Max cooler and it hit
75°C in silent mode and 70°C
in standard mode.Dictionary
120mm, 240mm
etc - These coolers are
generally categorised by
how large their radiators are.
The smallest use a radiator
that’s the size of a single
120mm case fan – it’s theseones that generally don’t
have the cooling power for
Threadripper and Socket
2066/2011 processors.
Then there are double-length
240mm radiators and even
larger 280mm radiators that
use 140mm fans. The bigger
the cooler, the greater the
overall cooling ability and
the slower the fans can spin
to keep things quiet.TDP - Thermal Design Power
(TDP) is the maximum
amount of heat generated by
a chip. It’s a good rough wayof telling how powerful a
cooler you’ll need for any
given processor.Decibels - We’ve measured
the noise created by each of
these coolers, and this is
measured in decibels (dB).
This is a logarithmic unit so if
something is 10dB louder it’s
actually 10 times as loud.
Therefore just a couple of dB
difference in our coolers is
significant. Ambient noise in
our test labs was 30dB and
noise levels were measured
30cm from the cooler.Group test
ALL-IN-ONE CPU COOLERS