The teardown and review of the NZXT AER series X Forty to Sixty Two 120mm liquid cooler.

When looking at the top part of these channels, it's clear that there isn't much to see. There are no liquid reservoirs, and not even any screws in this chamber. However, upon closer inspection, we can see that the barbs on the radiator are 90-degree rotational, which suggests a high level of design consideration for ease of installation.

Moving down to the bottom part of the cooler, we find an NZXT RGB LED board with an ST Electronics controller on it. This is likely where the cooling system's lighting functionality comes in play. The LEDs have a unique hue and style that sets them apart from other coolers in their class. While this aspect is certainly interesting, it doesn't necessarily impact the cooler's performance.

The next thing we notice is that the pump is located on the radiator, rather than on top of the CPU. This design choice may seem unconventional at first, but it's actually a clever solution to the problem of creating space for the fan hub. By placing the pump on the radiator, the designers were able to optimize the dissipation area while still providing adequate cooling.

Unfortunately, this design decision also means that the impeller is smaller than we would like to see. This limits the amount of air that can be pushed through the system, which in turn affects its performance. However, it's worth noting that this isn't necessarily a major issue, as the pump is still capable of moving a decent amount of fluid through the system.

One thing that's noticeable about this cooler is the use of piano wire to hold the barbs together. This suggests that some level of craftsmanship went into its design and assembly. However, it's also clear that not all components are created equal, as the impeller seems to be a lower-grade part than we would like to see.

In terms of thermal performance, we can expect this cooler to deliver results similar to other 120mm coolers in its class. While it may not excel in every aspect, it's still capable of providing decent cooling for most use cases.

The final thoughts on this cooler are that while it's an interesting design with some unique features, it may not be the best choice for everyone. The pump is small and limited in its performance, which could impact its ability to keep up with more demanding systems. However, as always, we recommend doing your own research and testing before making a purchase.

The teardown of this cooler has revealed many interesting aspects of its design and construction. From the unique lighting functionality to the clever use of space on the radiator, it's clear that some level of thought and planning went into its creation. While not every component is created equal, the overall design still manages to deliver decent results for a 120mm liquid cooler.

In conclusion, we can now return the cooler to its original state, with all components reassembled and ready for use. It's clear that this cooler has some unique features and advantages, but also some limitations and drawbacks. As always, we recommend doing your own research and testing before making a purchase.

The teardown of this NZXT AER series X Forty to Sixty Two 120mm liquid cooler has provided us with a deeper understanding of its design and construction. From the clever use of space on the radiator to the unique lighting functionality, it's clear that some level of thought and planning went into its creation. While not every component is created equal, the overall design still manages to deliver decent results for a 120mm liquid cooler.

The reviewer hopes that you found this review informative and helpful in your decision-making process. As always, we recommend doing your own research and testing before making a purchase. We also encourage you to subscribe to our channel for more reviews and teardowns of the latest technology.

In addition to this review, we have several other resources available to help you with your cooling needs. Our store carries a range of products, including mod mats and 3D teardown cubes like the one shown in this video. These can be found at patreon.com/ Cameras Nexus 2, which helps us directly support our content creation.

We'd like to thank you for watching and for your continued support. We're always here to help, so please don't hesitate to reach out with any questions or comments. Until next time, we bid you farewell.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entoday we're tearing down one of the weirder liquid cooler designs on the market this is the NZXT m22 the pump is located centrally in the radiator now this has a few implications for thermals but the major implication is a legal one the reason that companies like NZXT and their supplier apalla tech work with different orientation or location pumps in the loop is because ASA Tech actually holds a patent in the US that's been upheld against Coolermaster specifically for the site on Ceres that states that more or less the pump in the CPU block design is an ace attack design where else do you put it well apparently you put it in the middle of the radiator and to their credit that's about the best thing you could do because it does make the most sense to have it here but ASA tech kind of owns that right now for at least some regions so we're gonna take this apart today and see how it actually works cuz it's quite different from the normal ASA tech coolers that we see from basically the entire market before that this video is brought to you by I fix its brand new man to driver kit the iFixit Manta kit is a universal repair tool kit that includes 112 steel bits redesigned from the ground up with longer necks four four millimeter bits allowing more precision when working on components the $60 iFixit Manta kit has everything from pentalobe drivers to why drivers and standard bits learn more at the link in the description below so a few things with this we already tested it and have a review in the works if you want to check the review make sure you subscribe to catch that because it'll go up immediately after the teardown like the next day but to go over the basics it's a closed loop liquid cooler functionally it's the same idea as all the other ones however the radiator has the tubes slightly differently positioned so they're both offset to one side typically you'd have one here and one here but it looks like this might be some kind of filler drain which we'll look at momentarily the pump is right here and it's on both sides you can see there are four screws here which hold the plate on which I'm assuming that'll allow us to get access to the pump hopefully without destroying things and then obviously this takes place of some of the thin stack so there are no aluminum fins where this is and the other thing to note is that this happens to be centered right where the hub of the fan is the hub of the fan is basically a dead zone so if you think about putting this fan once we get there so if you think about putting this fan but the cable was in my hair I had to get it out if you put the fan here you'll see that the pump is right behind the hub you can't even really see the pump probably or at least not too well and that's because it's behind the hub the hub is a dead zone so it's not really pushing a ton of air through there now there is some bleed out the pump comes out a bit around the edges towards the innermost part of the fan blade so there there will be some loss of air flow through that channel and because we're not hitting fins we're hitting just to block the dissipation potential goes down so that has some thermal implications mostly negative ones for this design but depending on how good the pump is it might make up for it and depend on what's in this block maybe they have a bunch of micro fins or something like that which would certainly help but what we don't know is what is in here one would assume there are micro fins on the other side of the copper plate so we've got two interesting things to take apart today that's more or less the design one more note I suppose is that this is an RGB illuminated pump plate or well sea view block plate like always so you get the NZXT logos and then the pump itself has a cable coming out of it kind of annoyingly right on the radiator but your fans got a cable coming out of it anyway so you can kinda strap them both out the same side and then tie them together and hopefully that reduces cable clutter but it's certainly farther away from the motherboard than being on a traditional pump block so let's take this thing apart this cooler is made by a supplier known as a politic and it's a P al Tek and they make a couple of coolers on the market we've talked about them before but this one is one that they make for it now NZXT they make it for raid Max and they make it for Xigmatek those are the three I know of presently that use this design there might be one more but those are the three main ones so it's not the first time this design has been shown and the supplier is not unique it is pretty it's it is one of the smaller suppliers they're small enough that they kind of go under the radar for some of ASA Tech's legal filings with their other designs but they're big enough that they can get clients like NZXT so that's a supplier typically ASA tech makes most the coolers on the market including the other NZXT cracking coolers and they also some of the other suppliers include Kula torkoal idea if you prefer which they make some of course there's products so this is just a plate feels like steel pretty light lightweight metal plate over what looks to be the the motor the electromagnet and motor for the pump so once we get to the other side you'll see how many poles it has which are those coils that form the electromagnet which is what causes the impeller to move at this point we might start leaking any second now okay yep there's liquid in there alright so there's our impeller so let's kind of set this aside for a second while I figure out what to do with the liquid you see the liquid so that would be your almost certainly propylene glycol and then you've just there's a rubber gasket around the outside it's clamped down with it looks like just eight screws and that's it all Phillips had and if you can see in the chamber there we're not full to the top obviously because there was something displacing the water here but the chamber looks pretty straightforward so let's try and drain this so we can look at it more closely okay fortunately the gamers Nexus anti-static mod mat is highly water resistant as we've learned to doing this if you want one of the mod mats it's great for a build service it has PCIe wiring guides and other diagrams on it as cheat sheets it's a high quality rubber and print service that's great for PC building and is properly grounded for electrostatic discharge and you can grab one on stored on cameras nexus net and once this cooler is done draining I will finish my pitch for the mat so there should be a lot more liquid in here I think this will take a minute to get all of it a day but it does look like a standard propylene glycol mixture what we don't know is how much is is glycol and how much is distilled water that impacts the cooling performance it impacts the storage temperature sometimes companies will go with a higher glycol mixture so that they can store their coolers and say negative 40 C whereas others might only target negative 20 C and would use a lower concentration of glycol higher distilled water which improves your cooling performance but reduces the storage temperature or reduces it in a negative way anyway I think that's mostly empty there's probably there should probably be more in there he had still leaking a bit but that was not a lot of no that's actually that's about right 100 milliliters so in our experience with 120-millimeter liquid coolers and even now at 120 Zagat our experience is 120 is there typically 100 milliliters of liquid which this is almost exactly that after you account for the spillage so it should be pretty much empty at this point okay so chamber what we have is an impeller that's one of the weakest impellers I've seen in terms of design this thing is not a great looking impeller so it's a plastic blade on it's a plastic five blade design on top of the electromagnet and we've seen plastic three blade designs for example but these blades are exceedingly shallow which I would explain why it spins at such a high rpm over 3,000 rpm because it's got to make up for the limited impeller size and millimeters diameter is not that large I don't know exactly what it is I guess we could check 13 millimeters 13 millimeters for the hub this we're gonna have to approximate because none of them are directly across roughly 25 millimeters for the impeller size like blade blade so that's that is one of the weakest impellers I've seen it's a cheap plastic I could definitely snap the blades if I squeezed on it the to give you an idea the sixth-generation ASA tech pumps that Corsair is now using and soon other vendors those switch to a an impeller that looks an awful lot like the old Dyna Tron impellers from an tech cooler 1250 previously a second we have footage of this - you had a yellow three-pronged impeller in there 4.5 and 5th gen and 4th gen products so this is I don't know it's it does not impress me as far as the rest I guess we can try and see if this will come out that solder joint yes that's a solder joint this might not come out without breaking stuff okay so PCB is attached to wiring did I break the wiring no shockingly did not it's attached the coils but we've got one two three four five six so six coils for the electromagnet and let's get a closer look at the rest of this thing so at this point it's probably time to remove the cold plate on the cooler and that is gonna take it looks like either torques or pentalobe which would be really really annoying torques is fine yes it's torch okay cause right it might be some proprietary thin is gonna be okay well this the screws are certainly not in as tightly as they are with the ACE attack products which is neither good nor bad aside from being easier to take apart so here's the question do we have microphones on the other side of that cold plate and if you look at the sort of outlines and indentations the answers gonna be yes so what we have is this a gasket it is so what we have is a rubber gasket that presses against the micro fins like that and that's for pressure and flow reasons or directional gaskets allow the flow to be manipulated so that it's higher pressure through the areas where you want higher pressure and so that the flow is only entering or exiting where you want it to do so so we've got a cutout over the center channel which I'm not sure currently which side is in and which side is out I'm not sure do they label it anywhere of course not okay so we've gotten in and out channel in here basically and what I need to do now is see if there's anything else to this because this channel only goes well it probably goes to about the split in the cap and then above that is gonna be the NZXT probably created a custom piece of view for their lighting functionality they also created one for the ASA tech coolers they were the first company that ASA tech allowed to create as custom of a lighting on PCB solution as they did for the crack in series X forty to fifty to sixty two so that was remarkable about those I would assume they've done it for the same for this one it does have the same sort of hue style color integration and they've done the the best job in their class of 120 coolers for RGB LEDs not cooling is a different story as you'll find out but can I get any further in this not really okay so there's the top part of those channels nothing special there there's not even liquid in this chamber and there shouldn't be any screws here tiny screws that's going to be for dismounting the barbs I guess we can see how the barbs are constructed as well they are 90 degree rotational Barb's but that's really for the most part all you need to know about them they might be held together some piano wire or something and then here's your NZXT looks like NZXT made RGB LED board with an st electronics controller on it there are a couple more screws in here that would take apart the infinity mirror it's not really worth doing to be honest because it's not gonna teach us anything but if you wanted to replace for example if you wanted to rotate the NZXT logo on here to be a different orientation then you would basically not do any of the other stuff I just did and you would just remove this cap from the body that's the only step you'd do it wouldn't expose water to anything and then you would take these screws out and you can flip the logo around which some people asked about for the original crack in Syria so that's how you do it on this one that looks like a costume NZXT design though for that board so that's the teardown of this thing basically core components there's a gasket as always covering a set of micro fins I can't measure the density here but it doesn't look that different from the a-stack designs maybe fewer of them maybe a smaller cold plate pumps in the body of the radiator as illustrated earlier and then the rest is over here this is not a pump block it's really just a block that water goes through so there's actually no real conduction going on up here at the pump level not much anyway so what's happening is you've got some conduction obviously through the cold plate most of the majority of it taking energy away from the in the form of heat away from the CPU and then as it goes through the pump it or well the pump is pulling liquid through the tubes so I should say so as it goes through these tubes and down the radiator tubes as normally it's hitting the these tube lines in here getting conducted away by the fins which then the fan dissipates it so pretty straightforward design except the pump is on the radiator instead of on top of the CPU definitely interesting to look at perhaps not the best way to do it but you do have to give them credit for trying to do something different without violating or potentially violating a Stax patent depending on how they feel about it or how a stack feels about it because they're definitely partners too so that's obviously concerned not too many other ways to do it this is probably not the best one the impeller is certainly a lower grade impeller than I'd like to see the pump is a bit small to be fair so you can't fit much different than there than this but you can't really make the pump much bigger either because then you're exiting the fan hub which they're kind of already doing for your only deadzone size that's forgiving and and taking up more dissipation area where the fins would be so the best solution after that might be a pump attached to the tank on the radiator but then you have mounting support limitations in cases cases that say they can support 240 won't be able to support 240 with the pump on the tank if it's already barely supporting 240 normally so not a lot of options anyway very interesting cooler it's 100 bucks for this one we can probably salvage it if I don't know if it's worth it but we can probably put it back together and if you want more as always subscribe for more the review of this cooler with thermal data is coming probably tomorrow after this one uploads obviously intestine was down before the teardown and go to store that carries excess net to pick up one of the mod mats that you saw used in this video or one of our 3d teardown cubes like this one here with a three dimensional GM logo and of course patreon.com slash cameras nexus 2 helps out directly thank you for watching I'll see you all next timetoday we're tearing down one of the weirder liquid cooler designs on the market this is the NZXT m22 the pump is located centrally in the radiator now this has a few implications for thermals but the major implication is a legal one the reason that companies like NZXT and their supplier apalla tech work with different orientation or location pumps in the loop is because ASA Tech actually holds a patent in the US that's been upheld against Coolermaster specifically for the site on Ceres that states that more or less the pump in the CPU block design is an ace attack design where else do you put it well apparently you put it in the middle of the radiator and to their credit that's about the best thing you could do because it does make the most sense to have it here but ASA tech kind of owns that right now for at least some regions so we're gonna take this apart today and see how it actually works cuz it's quite different from the normal ASA tech coolers that we see from basically the entire market before that this video is brought to you by I fix its brand new man to driver kit the iFixit Manta kit is a universal repair tool kit that includes 112 steel bits redesigned from the ground up with longer necks four four millimeter bits allowing more precision when working on components the $60 iFixit Manta kit has everything from pentalobe drivers to why drivers and standard bits learn more at the link in the description below so a few things with this we already tested it and have a review in the works if you want to check the review make sure you subscribe to catch that because it'll go up immediately after the teardown like the next day but to go over the basics it's a closed loop liquid cooler functionally it's the same idea as all the other ones however the radiator has the tubes slightly differently positioned so they're both offset to one side typically you'd have one here and one here but it looks like this might be some kind of filler drain which we'll look at momentarily the pump is right here and it's on both sides you can see there are four screws here which hold the plate on which I'm assuming that'll allow us to get access to the pump hopefully without destroying things and then obviously this takes place of some of the thin stack so there are no aluminum fins where this is and the other thing to note is that this happens to be centered right where the hub of the fan is the hub of the fan is basically a dead zone so if you think about putting this fan once we get there so if you think about putting this fan but the cable was in my hair I had to get it out if you put the fan here you'll see that the pump is right behind the hub you can't even really see the pump probably or at least not too well and that's because it's behind the hub the hub is a dead zone so it's not really pushing a ton of air through there now there is some bleed out the pump comes out a bit around the edges towards the innermost part of the fan blade so there there will be some loss of air flow through that channel and because we're not hitting fins we're hitting just to block the dissipation potential goes down so that has some thermal implications mostly negative ones for this design but depending on how good the pump is it might make up for it and depend on what's in this block maybe they have a bunch of micro fins or something like that which would certainly help but what we don't know is what is in here one would assume there are micro fins on the other side of the copper plate so we've got two interesting things to take apart today that's more or less the design one more note I suppose is that this is an RGB illuminated pump plate or well sea view block plate like always so you get the NZXT logos and then the pump itself has a cable coming out of it kind of annoyingly right on the radiator but your fans got a cable coming out of it anyway so you can kinda strap them both out the same side and then tie them together and hopefully that reduces cable clutter but it's certainly farther away from the motherboard than being on a traditional pump block so let's take this thing apart this cooler is made by a supplier known as a politic and it's a P al Tek and they make a couple of coolers on the market we've talked about them before but this one is one that they make for it now NZXT they make it for raid Max and they make it for Xigmatek those are the three I know of presently that use this design there might be one more but those are the three main ones so it's not the first time this design has been shown and the supplier is not unique it is pretty it's it is one of the smaller suppliers they're small enough that they kind of go under the radar for some of ASA Tech's legal filings with their other designs but they're big enough that they can get clients like NZXT so that's a supplier typically ASA tech makes most the coolers on the market including the other NZXT cracking coolers and they also some of the other suppliers include Kula torkoal idea if you prefer which they make some of course there's products so this is just a plate feels like steel pretty light lightweight metal plate over what looks to be the the motor the electromagnet and motor for the pump so once we get to the other side you'll see how many poles it has which are those coils that form the electromagnet which is what causes the impeller to move at this point we might start leaking any second now okay yep there's liquid in there alright so there's our impeller so let's kind of set this aside for a second while I figure out what to do with the liquid you see the liquid so that would be your almost certainly propylene glycol and then you've just there's a rubber gasket around the outside it's clamped down with it looks like just eight screws and that's it all Phillips had and if you can see in the chamber there we're not full to the top obviously because there was something displacing the water here but the chamber looks pretty straightforward so let's try and drain this so we can look at it more closely okay fortunately the gamers Nexus anti-static mod mat is highly water resistant as we've learned to doing this if you want one of the mod mats it's great for a build service it has PCIe wiring guides and other diagrams on it as cheat sheets it's a high quality rubber and print service that's great for PC building and is properly grounded for electrostatic discharge and you can grab one on stored on cameras nexus net and once this cooler is done draining I will finish my pitch for the mat so there should be a lot more liquid in here I think this will take a minute to get all of it a day but it does look like a standard propylene glycol mixture what we don't know is how much is is glycol and how much is distilled water that impacts the cooling performance it impacts the storage temperature sometimes companies will go with a higher glycol mixture so that they can store their coolers and say negative 40 C whereas others might only target negative 20 C and would use a lower concentration of glycol higher distilled water which improves your cooling performance but reduces the storage temperature or reduces it in a negative way anyway I think that's mostly empty there's probably there should probably be more in there he had still leaking a bit but that was not a lot of no that's actually that's about right 100 milliliters so in our experience with 120-millimeter liquid coolers and even now at 120 Zagat our experience is 120 is there typically 100 milliliters of liquid which this is almost exactly that after you account for the spillage so it should be pretty much empty at this point okay so chamber what we have is an impeller that's one of the weakest impellers I've seen in terms of design this thing is not a great looking impeller so it's a plastic blade on it's a plastic five blade design on top of the electromagnet and we've seen plastic three blade designs for example but these blades are exceedingly shallow which I would explain why it spins at such a high rpm over 3,000 rpm because it's got to make up for the limited impeller size and millimeters diameter is not that large I don't know exactly what it is I guess we could check 13 millimeters 13 millimeters for the hub this we're gonna have to approximate because none of them are directly across roughly 25 millimeters for the impeller size like blade blade so that's that is one of the weakest impellers I've seen it's a cheap plastic I could definitely snap the blades if I squeezed on it the to give you an idea the sixth-generation ASA tech pumps that Corsair is now using and soon other vendors those switch to a an impeller that looks an awful lot like the old Dyna Tron impellers from an tech cooler 1250 previously a second we have footage of this - you had a yellow three-pronged impeller in there 4.5 and 5th gen and 4th gen products so this is I don't know it's it does not impress me as far as the rest I guess we can try and see if this will come out that solder joint yes that's a solder joint this might not come out without breaking stuff okay so PCB is attached to wiring did I break the wiring no shockingly did not it's attached the coils but we've got one two three four five six so six coils for the electromagnet and let's get a closer look at the rest of this thing so at this point it's probably time to remove the cold plate on the cooler and that is gonna take it looks like either torques or pentalobe which would be really really annoying torques is fine yes it's torch okay cause right it might be some proprietary thin is gonna be okay well this the screws are certainly not in as tightly as they are with the ACE attack products which is neither good nor bad aside from being easier to take apart so here's the question do we have microphones on the other side of that cold plate and if you look at the sort of outlines and indentations the answers gonna be yes so what we have is this a gasket it is so what we have is a rubber gasket that presses against the micro fins like that and that's for pressure and flow reasons or directional gaskets allow the flow to be manipulated so that it's higher pressure through the areas where you want higher pressure and so that the flow is only entering or exiting where you want it to do so so we've got a cutout over the center channel which I'm not sure currently which side is in and which side is out I'm not sure do they label it anywhere of course not okay so we've gotten in and out channel in here basically and what I need to do now is see if there's anything else to this because this channel only goes well it probably goes to about the split in the cap and then above that is gonna be the NZXT probably created a custom piece of view for their lighting functionality they also created one for the ASA tech coolers they were the first company that ASA tech allowed to create as custom of a lighting on PCB solution as they did for the crack in series X forty to fifty to sixty two so that was remarkable about those I would assume they've done it for the same for this one it does have the same sort of hue style color integration and they've done the the best job in their class of 120 coolers for RGB LEDs not cooling is a different story as you'll find out but can I get any further in this not really okay so there's the top part of those channels nothing special there there's not even liquid in this chamber and there shouldn't be any screws here tiny screws that's going to be for dismounting the barbs I guess we can see how the barbs are constructed as well they are 90 degree rotational Barb's but that's really for the most part all you need to know about them they might be held together some piano wire or something and then here's your NZXT looks like NZXT made RGB LED board with an st electronics controller on it there are a couple more screws in here that would take apart the infinity mirror it's not really worth doing to be honest because it's not gonna teach us anything but if you wanted to replace for example if you wanted to rotate the NZXT logo on here to be a different orientation then you would basically not do any of the other stuff I just did and you would just remove this cap from the body that's the only step you'd do it wouldn't expose water to anything and then you would take these screws out and you can flip the logo around which some people asked about for the original crack in Syria so that's how you do it on this one that looks like a costume NZXT design though for that board so that's the teardown of this thing basically core components there's a gasket as always covering a set of micro fins I can't measure the density here but it doesn't look that different from the a-stack designs maybe fewer of them maybe a smaller cold plate pumps in the body of the radiator as illustrated earlier and then the rest is over here this is not a pump block it's really just a block that water goes through so there's actually no real conduction going on up here at the pump level not much anyway so what's happening is you've got some conduction obviously through the cold plate most of the majority of it taking energy away from the in the form of heat away from the CPU and then as it goes through the pump it or well the pump is pulling liquid through the tubes so I should say so as it goes through these tubes and down the radiator tubes as normally it's hitting the these tube lines in here getting conducted away by the fins which then the fan dissipates it so pretty straightforward design except the pump is on the radiator instead of on top of the CPU definitely interesting to look at perhaps not the best way to do it but you do have to give them credit for trying to do something different without violating or potentially violating a Stax patent depending on how they feel about it or how a stack feels about it because they're definitely partners too so that's obviously concerned not too many other ways to do it this is probably not the best one the impeller is certainly a lower grade impeller than I'd like to see the pump is a bit small to be fair so you can't fit much different than there than this but you can't really make the pump much bigger either because then you're exiting the fan hub which they're kind of already doing for your only deadzone size that's forgiving and and taking up more dissipation area where the fins would be so the best solution after that might be a pump attached to the tank on the radiator but then you have mounting support limitations in cases cases that say they can support 240 won't be able to support 240 with the pump on the tank if it's already barely supporting 240 normally so not a lot of options anyway very interesting cooler it's 100 bucks for this one we can probably salvage it if I don't know if it's worth it but we can probably put it back together and if you want more as always subscribe for more the review of this cooler with thermal data is coming probably tomorrow after this one uploads obviously intestine was down before the teardown and go to store that carries excess net to pick up one of the mod mats that you saw used in this video or one of our 3d teardown cubes like this one here with a three dimensional GM logo and of course patreon.com slash cameras nexus 2 helps out directly thank you for watching I'll see you all next time\n"