The Peerless Assassin: A Cooling Powerhouse that Defies Expectations

As I sat down to test the Peerless Assassin, a liquid cooler that had been making waves in the enthusiast community, I couldn't help but feel a sense of excitement and trepidation. Would this newcomer be able to dethrone the reigning king of coolers, the Noctua U12A? Or would it fall short of expectations due to its unassuming design and relatively low price point?

One thing was certain: the Peerless Assassin's performance was nothing short of phenomenal. At lower noise levels, it actually managed to outperform the Fuma 2 Revision B, a cooler that had been touted as one of the best in its class. As fan speeds increased, the gap narrowed to just a single degree, but make no mistake: this cooler was holding its own against some of the toughest competition in the industry.

But it's not just about raw performance; it's also about price-to-performance ratio. And on this front, the Peerless Assassin is truly unbeatable. At around $45-$50, it's a fraction of the cost of more established coolers like the Noctua U12A (which can fetch upwards of $100 in the US), or even the Dark Rock Pro 4 (which starts at around $90). Meanwhile, high-end coolers like the D15 and Fuma 2 are often priced in the hundreds.

So what's behind this incredible value? The answer lies in the cooler's design and engineering. With its sleek, compact body and efficient fan setup, it's able to achieve remarkable cooling performance while keeping noise levels relatively low. But don't just take my word for it – I put the Peerless Assassin through a series of rigorous tests to determine its true capabilities.

One thing that became clear was that the cooler's stock fans were more than adequate, and in some cases even surpassed those found on more expensive coolers. The Gentle Typhoons, which are among the best fan units available, were installed as part of my testing process – and while they did offer a slight performance boost at lower heat loads, I couldn't bring myself to justify the additional cost.

So what's the takeaway from these tests? In short: the Peerless Assassin is an incredible cooling powerhouse that punches well above its weight class. With its unbeatable price-to-performance ratio and impressive performance, it's a must-consider for anyone looking to upgrade their system without breaking the bank. Whether you're a seasoned enthusiast or just starting out, this cooler has earned my seal of approval – and I think it will do the same for yours.

But before I conclude, I want to reiterate one crucial point: never use your fan profiles on your motherboard at auto setting. This is a common mistake that can completely kneecap the performance of even the best coolers, including our peerless assassin here. Take the time to customize your fan curves and optimize for both performance and noise levels – trust me, it's worth the effort.

In terms of recommendations, I'll be issuing two awards to the Peerless Assassin: the "Damn Good" award for its incredible performance, and the "Damn Good Value" award for its unbeatable price-to-performance ratio. It may not be the prettiest cooler on the block – but when it comes down to raw power and value, this newcomer is truly a force to be reckoned with.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwell good morning good evening good night wherever you are i'm mike with harvard canucks and i wanted to give you a little bit of an insight into the way i approach a lot of my videos i read almost every single one of the comments that you guys leave in the comment threads and with good reason because those comments have led me to some amazing products amazing ideas in the past and one of the main things that a lot of you guys have been talking about in the air cooler videos that i've been doing is this guy this is the thermal right peerless assassin and why have there been a lot of mentions about this well it's really about price to performance a lot of you believe that this guy that is actually priced in the under 60 category can go head to head with some of the best coolers on the market and that's important because in a world where we are paying 90 100 120 for some of the noctua be quiet high-end coolers that kind of price that means a whole lot so we're going to get into that right after message from our sponsor welcome to the light where wings fly silent and constantly impress with performance what the wings of the light have beautiful circular showcase i'm just here for some fans this diffusion is unlike anything you've seen before and i've seen rgb fans before yeah but these are argb from be quiet you're saying this is their first arch fan must be good right we have 120s 140s high speed and standard versions too there's also the three pack with a hub that is right impress your inner self with the new light wings so you can fly into the be quiet light wings check them out below anyways the first thing i wanted to mention about the peerless assassin is that there are just so many of them out there some are powder coated white while others are black some have rgb while others don't and some like the se series are a few bucks cheaper than the normal models so what's actually the difference here absolutely nothing that would really affect performance to be honest with you it's purely cosmetic the sc models don't have a cap top like the normal ones do and that gives them three extra fins but otherwise everything from the heat pipes to the bases to the fans are the exact same so the one i have here is the peerless assassin pa-120 white edition now this thing typically goes for about 45 to 50 us but you can typically find it for even less than that if you luck out and find one of the coupon codes that thermal art usually has now the other thing i wanted to mention is that the peerless assassin series has literally something for everyone price point and features so you can start actually under the 40 mark for the sc edition all the way up to 60 65 bucks for the argb white edition and even at those prices if this thing can perform up to what some of you guys are claiming it will this thing could be a freaking steal so what we have here is a budget price cooler that's supposed to run head to head against some of the best around so you'd expect some corners to be cut somewhere right but i sure as hell can't find where that happened because the white version is just stunning to look at and the build quality well that's top notch too overall it's pretty compact for a dual tower heatsink that uses 220 millimeter fans basically it's a millimeter higher than the fuma 2 while also being a lot more compact in length and overall width but anyways let's start with the base since they use a pure copper core that's nickel plated and then polished to an almost mirror-like finish that's attached to six massive six millimeter heat pipes that rise up into two separate fence decks that are all powder coated white those fin stacks have a slight indent that's used to minimize the effect of the fan hub's airflow dead zone as well overall though the design takes a lot of cues from other dual tower coolers like the noctua d series and the scythe fuma the top on this one's got the thermal right logo and capped off heat pipes whereas the se series isn't quite as clean since it doesn't have this finishing plate and its heat pipes are simply crimped shut now if i did have one small and i mean small bit of critique about this thing it's just the fact that the whites don't really quite match i don't know if you can see it here on camera but you're probably gonna be able to see it on a bunch of the b-roll the fin stacks themselves are a little bit of a creamy white while the fans themselves have a cooler white finish and yes matching white is so hard in any pc build and it's really disappointing that thermal write couldn't do it here but would you actually see this little discrepancy in a build i highly doubt it now speaking of the fans while they use a pretty basic 120 millimeter design that's not particularly good in the static pressure department but they run at a constant 1 500 rpm and the integrated vibration dampeners should help lower the overall noise but what about installation well the first thing i've got to say is that after 15 years of using thermal right coolers in one build after another after another i have never ever had an issue with our installation process this one it covers all those same bases but the one thing that you have to take into account if you have an lga 1700 system you will need a nine dollar adapter kit but anyways let's get forward and install this onto an amd motherboard and see what it's like all you need to do is keep the amd back plate attach four standoffs and then screw down the two retention arms through those spacers then apply thermal compound align the cooler's pre-installed mounting bar with the studs and screw the whole thing down then reinstall the fans the only thing that you might need to do is lift up the fan just a little bit if you have extra high memory modules so the installation process pretty straightforward right and i always have to give thermal right kudos for that and i'm doing it here again but what i wanted to do now before we get into performance is really talk to you guys about how temperatures and decibel levels that you're going to see in the performance charts end up aligning with one another and how you can repeat some of our results okay here it is on the left you've got the decibel reading that was taken about 24 inches away from the closed case or 60 centimeters for all you metric folks out there next to that is the fan speed percentage and rpm setting that got us to that point so hopefully this is useful if you decide to actually use or buy the peerless assassin in the future anyways i'm sure a lot of you guys have skipped this part of the video why because it is the performance results so what we're going to do here is a little bit different from the last couple of videos that you've seen because this needs to be compared against high-end air coolers so we're actually going to start at 120 watts and make our way up from there at lower decibel levels the peerless assassin can run right alongside the best of the best so what everybody was hoping for and that means the knocked with d15 and be quiet dark rock pro 4 are in for a world of hurt when it comes to price to performance here it also manages to beat the new fuma 2 by a few degrees and just demolishes the noctua u12a at every single decibel level but it also has an extra gear since its fans are some of the fastest running here so performance can get even better if you're willing to put up with more noise normalizing that to a constant 38 decibels put things into even more of a perspective at this almost inaudible level this thing beats the d15 while matching the pro 4. and that aio from corsair come on it's just so hard to recommend a liquid cooler when it comes to combining noise with overall cooling performance all right look i'm sorry but i need to step in here again because i need to reiterate and this is so important how inexpensive this guy is at 45 to 50 dollars compared to a lot of the other coolers that we're comparing it against now the knock to us the u12a which gets spanked by this thing goes for about a hundred dollars or more in the us on the other hand even the dark rock pro 4 ends up going for about 90. you look at the d15 it goes for more you look at the fuma 2 it's more expensive so far this thing is just demolishing everything else on the price to performance front but let's push the cpu to 165 watts and see what happens starting with the u12a and fuma 2 revision b the peerless assassin manages to actually beat the fuma 2 by a good amount at lower noise levels and then the gap narrows to a single degree as fan speeds increase but what about those higher end coolers well if you compare those results to the d15 and dark rock pro 4 thermal right's cooler is only within a degree or two at first but if you push things past the 40 decibel mark it posts some crazy numbers and even at my happy medium point of 38 decibels the performance on offer here is just incredible given the price i know i've repeated myself over and over again but it's just the way it is it's just as good as the best coolers i've ever tested but i do want to point out one important thing and this goes for every cooler out there never and i repeat never keep your fan profiles on your motherboard at auto setting what that does is it completely kneecaps every single one of these coolers because your motherboard will be striving to hit the lowest temperatures possible and even the peerless assassin will get overly loud for the results that it gives you so make sure that you go into those fan curves and optimize for performance and noise levels and here's what really separates the best of the best from all the rest basically what you'll see is that coolers with a larger thermal mass end up winning ore in the u12a's case finally becoming a lot more competitive anyways once the heat rises to almost ridiculous levels the peerless assassin ends up outperforming the scythe and u12a at quieter fan speeds while matching those two at higher decibel outputs but it's just nowhere close to the big boys overall though the results are still impressive you just need to take into account that hardly anyone will be pushing their processor to output this kind of heat so when looking at these results you need to ask yourself do you really need to spend 90 or more on a heatsink and the answer for most people will be absolutely not but i didn't want to end things there the next step is what happens when you perform a fan swap are these original fans any good so for that i looked towards the neatdec gentle typhoons that were basically the overall winner in our massive fan roundup that you can find right up here so check out how these things did and installing some of the best fans on the market did end up improving temperatures at lower heat loads at a nominal 38 decibels but there's something else you need to consider here it's the fact two of those gentle typhoons will probably put you back somewhere between 35 and 50 bucks these days to me at least that really isn't worthwhile from price to performance increase standpoint because overall it seems the stock fans are pretty well engineered so i guess that brings us to yes the conclusion and this is going to be a super short one the peerless assassin if you can find it for the prices that i mentioned and you like the looks and it'll fit into your build go out and buy it period point finale this is basically the first cooler that i'm going to give two awards to number one is the damn good award amazing performance the other one is the damn good value award its price to performance ratio is off the charts it is almost perfection so anyways i'm mike with hardware canucks thank you so much for bringing this cooler up to me and i will see you in the next onewell good morning good evening good night wherever you are i'm mike with harvard canucks and i wanted to give you a little bit of an insight into the way i approach a lot of my videos i read almost every single one of the comments that you guys leave in the comment threads and with good reason because those comments have led me to some amazing products amazing ideas in the past and one of the main things that a lot of you guys have been talking about in the air cooler videos that i've been doing is this guy this is the thermal right peerless assassin and why have there been a lot of mentions about this well it's really about price to performance a lot of you believe that this guy that is actually priced in the under 60 category can go head to head with some of the best coolers on the market and that's important because in a world where we are paying 90 100 120 for some of the noctua be quiet high-end coolers that kind of price that means a whole lot so we're going to get into that right after message from our sponsor welcome to the light where wings fly silent and constantly impress with performance what the wings of the light have beautiful circular showcase i'm just here for some fans this diffusion is unlike anything you've seen before and i've seen rgb fans before yeah but these are argb from be quiet you're saying this is their first arch fan must be good right we have 120s 140s high speed and standard versions too there's also the three pack with a hub that is right impress your inner self with the new light wings so you can fly into the be quiet light wings check them out below anyways the first thing i wanted to mention about the peerless assassin is that there are just so many of them out there some are powder coated white while others are black some have rgb while others don't and some like the se series are a few bucks cheaper than the normal models so what's actually the difference here absolutely nothing that would really affect performance to be honest with you it's purely cosmetic the sc models don't have a cap top like the normal ones do and that gives them three extra fins but otherwise everything from the heat pipes to the bases to the fans are the exact same so the one i have here is the peerless assassin pa-120 white edition now this thing typically goes for about 45 to 50 us but you can typically find it for even less than that if you luck out and find one of the coupon codes that thermal art usually has now the other thing i wanted to mention is that the peerless assassin series has literally something for everyone price point and features so you can start actually under the 40 mark for the sc edition all the way up to 60 65 bucks for the argb white edition and even at those prices if this thing can perform up to what some of you guys are claiming it will this thing could be a freaking steal so what we have here is a budget price cooler that's supposed to run head to head against some of the best around so you'd expect some corners to be cut somewhere right but i sure as hell can't find where that happened because the white version is just stunning to look at and the build quality well that's top notch too overall it's pretty compact for a dual tower heatsink that uses 220 millimeter fans basically it's a millimeter higher than the fuma 2 while also being a lot more compact in length and overall width but anyways let's start with the base since they use a pure copper core that's nickel plated and then polished to an almost mirror-like finish that's attached to six massive six millimeter heat pipes that rise up into two separate fence decks that are all powder coated white those fin stacks have a slight indent that's used to minimize the effect of the fan hub's airflow dead zone as well overall though the design takes a lot of cues from other dual tower coolers like the noctua d series and the scythe fuma the top on this one's got the thermal right logo and capped off heat pipes whereas the se series isn't quite as clean since it doesn't have this finishing plate and its heat pipes are simply crimped shut now if i did have one small and i mean small bit of critique about this thing it's just the fact that the whites don't really quite match i don't know if you can see it here on camera but you're probably gonna be able to see it on a bunch of the b-roll the fin stacks themselves are a little bit of a creamy white while the fans themselves have a cooler white finish and yes matching white is so hard in any pc build and it's really disappointing that thermal write couldn't do it here but would you actually see this little discrepancy in a build i highly doubt it now speaking of the fans while they use a pretty basic 120 millimeter design that's not particularly good in the static pressure department but they run at a constant 1 500 rpm and the integrated vibration dampeners should help lower the overall noise but what about installation well the first thing i've got to say is that after 15 years of using thermal right coolers in one build after another after another i have never ever had an issue with our installation process this one it covers all those same bases but the one thing that you have to take into account if you have an lga 1700 system you will need a nine dollar adapter kit but anyways let's get forward and install this onto an amd motherboard and see what it's like all you need to do is keep the amd back plate attach four standoffs and then screw down the two retention arms through those spacers then apply thermal compound align the cooler's pre-installed mounting bar with the studs and screw the whole thing down then reinstall the fans the only thing that you might need to do is lift up the fan just a little bit if you have extra high memory modules so the installation process pretty straightforward right and i always have to give thermal right kudos for that and i'm doing it here again but what i wanted to do now before we get into performance is really talk to you guys about how temperatures and decibel levels that you're going to see in the performance charts end up aligning with one another and how you can repeat some of our results okay here it is on the left you've got the decibel reading that was taken about 24 inches away from the closed case or 60 centimeters for all you metric folks out there next to that is the fan speed percentage and rpm setting that got us to that point so hopefully this is useful if you decide to actually use or buy the peerless assassin in the future anyways i'm sure a lot of you guys have skipped this part of the video why because it is the performance results so what we're going to do here is a little bit different from the last couple of videos that you've seen because this needs to be compared against high-end air coolers so we're actually going to start at 120 watts and make our way up from there at lower decibel levels the peerless assassin can run right alongside the best of the best so what everybody was hoping for and that means the knocked with d15 and be quiet dark rock pro 4 are in for a world of hurt when it comes to price to performance here it also manages to beat the new fuma 2 by a few degrees and just demolishes the noctua u12a at every single decibel level but it also has an extra gear since its fans are some of the fastest running here so performance can get even better if you're willing to put up with more noise normalizing that to a constant 38 decibels put things into even more of a perspective at this almost inaudible level this thing beats the d15 while matching the pro 4. and that aio from corsair come on it's just so hard to recommend a liquid cooler when it comes to combining noise with overall cooling performance all right look i'm sorry but i need to step in here again because i need to reiterate and this is so important how inexpensive this guy is at 45 to 50 dollars compared to a lot of the other coolers that we're comparing it against now the knock to us the u12a which gets spanked by this thing goes for about a hundred dollars or more in the us on the other hand even the dark rock pro 4 ends up going for about 90. you look at the d15 it goes for more you look at the fuma 2 it's more expensive so far this thing is just demolishing everything else on the price to performance front but let's push the cpu to 165 watts and see what happens starting with the u12a and fuma 2 revision b the peerless assassin manages to actually beat the fuma 2 by a good amount at lower noise levels and then the gap narrows to a single degree as fan speeds increase but what about those higher end coolers well if you compare those results to the d15 and dark rock pro 4 thermal right's cooler is only within a degree or two at first but if you push things past the 40 decibel mark it posts some crazy numbers and even at my happy medium point of 38 decibels the performance on offer here is just incredible given the price i know i've repeated myself over and over again but it's just the way it is it's just as good as the best coolers i've ever tested but i do want to point out one important thing and this goes for every cooler out there never and i repeat never keep your fan profiles on your motherboard at auto setting what that does is it completely kneecaps every single one of these coolers because your motherboard will be striving to hit the lowest temperatures possible and even the peerless assassin will get overly loud for the results that it gives you so make sure that you go into those fan curves and optimize for performance and noise levels and here's what really separates the best of the best from all the rest basically what you'll see is that coolers with a larger thermal mass end up winning ore in the u12a's case finally becoming a lot more competitive anyways once the heat rises to almost ridiculous levels the peerless assassin ends up outperforming the scythe and u12a at quieter fan speeds while matching those two at higher decibel outputs but it's just nowhere close to the big boys overall though the results are still impressive you just need to take into account that hardly anyone will be pushing their processor to output this kind of heat so when looking at these results you need to ask yourself do you really need to spend 90 or more on a heatsink and the answer for most people will be absolutely not but i didn't want to end things there the next step is what happens when you perform a fan swap are these original fans any good so for that i looked towards the neatdec gentle typhoons that were basically the overall winner in our massive fan roundup that you can find right up here so check out how these things did and installing some of the best fans on the market did end up improving temperatures at lower heat loads at a nominal 38 decibels but there's something else you need to consider here it's the fact two of those gentle typhoons will probably put you back somewhere between 35 and 50 bucks these days to me at least that really isn't worthwhile from price to performance increase standpoint because overall it seems the stock fans are pretty well engineered so i guess that brings us to yes the conclusion and this is going to be a super short one the peerless assassin if you can find it for the prices that i mentioned and you like the looks and it'll fit into your build go out and buy it period point finale this is basically the first cooler that i'm going to give two awards to number one is the damn good award amazing performance the other one is the damn good value award its price to performance ratio is off the charts it is almost perfection so anyways i'm mike with hardware canucks thank you so much for bringing this cooler up to me and i will see you in the next one\n"