**The Ultimate Test: Budget Air Coolers Face Off**

The wait is finally over, and we're excited to share the results of our extensive testing of budget air coolers. Months of research, countless hours of benchmarking, and a team of experts have come together to bring you the most comprehensive review of budget air coolers on the market.

**A Log Jam: Thermal Performance**

We began by evaluating the thermal performance of each cooler. In this area, the results were quite varied. The 400 V2 and Hyper 212S struggled to keep up with the demands of modern CPUs, failing to drop temperatures below 88 degrees Celsius in many cases. Even the more expensive Pure Rock 2 didn't impress, with only a slight advantage over the more affordable options.

**The Contenders: Cooling Performance**

Next, we moved on to evaluating the cooling performance of each cooler. The Arctic Co and Slim 2 were pleasant surprises, delivering impressive results that rivaled those of their pricier counterparts. However, the Pure Rock 2's size gave it a significant advantage in terms of thermal mass, allowing it to outperform its competition.

**The Failure Zone: Wattage Limitations**

One of the most significant limitations we encountered was wattage. The Arctic Co and Slim 2 were able to handle high-wattage CPUs with ease, but other coolers struggled. The 400 V2 and Hyper 212S were particularly vulnerable, failing to deliver on their promises when pushed to their limits.

**The Gamex: High-End Cooling at a Budget Price**

However, not all budget air coolers are created equal. The Pure Rock II was a pleasant surprise, delivering impressive results despite its high price tag. Additionally, the 92mm Slim 2 proved itself to be a worthy competitor, rivaling even the most expensive coolers in terms of performance.

**The Arctic Co: A Quiet Giant**

But what really impressed us was the Arctic Co. This cooler's ability to run quietly and efficiently made it a top contender in our testing. Its high-performance capabilities were matched only by its whisper-quiet operation.

**The 224XT: A Game-Changer**

And then there's the Se224XT. This cooler took the cake, delivering results that rivaled even the most expensive options on the market. Its ability to handle high-wattage CPUs with ease made it a clear winner in our testing.

**Honorable Mentions**

While we had several top performers in our testing, there were also some honorable mentions worth mentioning. The Tough Air 310 was a particular surprise, delivering impressive results at an affordable price. Additionally, the Vetro V2 performed well across the board, making it a solid option for those on a budget.

**The Top Three**

So, who comes out on top? In our testing, we had to narrow down the field to just three coolers. The winner was, without a doubt, the Se224XT. This cooler's ability to handle high-wattage CPUs with ease made it a clear winner in our testing.

**The Vetro V2: A Close Second**

Coming in at a close second was the Vetro V2. Its performance across all tests was impressive, making it a solid option for those on a budget.

**The Arctic Esports: The Quiet and Efficient Choice**

Finally, we had to mention the Arctic Esports. This cooler's ability to run quietly and efficiently made it a top contender in our testing. Its high-performance capabilities were matched only by its whisper-quiet operation.

**Conclusion**

And so, after months of testing and evaluation, we have our final answer. Budget air coolers just aren't created equal, but there are some real winners out there. Whether you're on a tight budget or looking for something to complement your high-end CPU, there's something here for everyone. We hope this review has been informative and helpful in making informed purchasing decisions. Thanks for joining us on this journey, and we'll see you next time!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enokay everybody this is one that i am ultra excited for and this is not like a fake youtube excited this is actually really exciting because if you guys have been watching the channel for the last couple of months you've been seeing that i've gone into budget air cooling reviews pretty hardcore we've we've reviewed a bunch of them it's actually really near and dear to my heart because my first pc was just done with a basic budget air cooler and that was like 20 years ago now so i understand that air coolers are something that a lot of you are choosing in order to save a couple of bucks in your pcs now is that necessarily a good thing well from the ones that i've reviewed so far some of these can actually perform really really well a lot better than even i expected so what i wanted to do is i wanted to have like this compendium review and that would be rounding up a bunch of budget air coolers now there's going to be the old ones that i already tested and a bunch of new ones some of these are actually newly released on the market i want to get to all of that including the price points including the performance and a lot of other information right after a message from our sponsor well well well small package but with a lot of responsibility the newly sp750 power supply brings performance to the sfx space with a fully modular design and complementing low profile cables the 750 watt 80 plus gold unit should satisfy most sff needs especially with a zero rpm mode under 40 load and this pretty elegant exposed aluminum housing it's about the size the power and where it comes from check out the sp 750 sfx power supply down below so with that out of the way i wanted to just mention very quickly this is going to be a bit of a longer video so if there's a cooler or some information that you want and you are looking for specific bits and pieces of this video please timestamps are in the description below and in the timeline so let's set up some ground rules about how i went into this video so first of all none of these coolers is on average over 40 dollars u.s and yes some of them are going to be a little bit more expensive depending on the regions that you're in the second thing is that all of these actually need it to be available to buy and that's a little bit of a harder thing right now in the given market conditions now in total we've got 11 coolers and it's almost impossible to get every single one of these quote-unquote budget air coolers on the market there's dozens and dozens of them and it makes it almost impossible to put all into one video so what i wanted to do is go through the coolers that we've had right now and five of those i've actually reviewed in the past and those links are going to be down in the description below so first of all is the be quiet pure rock slim 2 there's also the vetro v5 there's the cooler master 212 black edition the hyper 212 evo and finally the aliexpress special the mt6s so these ones are gonna be put up against the brand new ones now look you don't need all the descriptions and everything else about these coolers go to those individual videos we're just going to sort of gloss over a lot of them in this video other than in the performance results now the new ones the new ones are some of the most iconic on the market right now that would be the arctic cooling freezer 34 esports the freezer 34 co which is a little bit more of a budget oriented option for that one there's also the pure rock 2 that's actually be quiet entry level 120 millimeter tower cooler right now then there's also the deepcool gammaxx 400 v2 and there's the really new kit on the block that would be the thermaltake tough air 310. and lastly there's the id cooling 224 xt basic which is actually a real surprise in this video now there are a couple things that i wanted to mention especially about pricing because from regent to region they can vary wildly so what i've done is i've put together yes a couple of charts that i hope illustrate this pretty well one of them is an average chart and this average basically what i did is i went across a bunch of retailers and found the average cost for these coolers right now when we're making the video then what i also did is i went and i found the lowest cost that has been for these coolers in the last 12 months but you also have to take these prices that you're going to see with a little grain of salt because remember we're making this video a couple of days before you're actually seeing it so those prices may have changed so obviously the pure rock slim ii is the lowest at just 26 bucks but its availability is actually limited to only a couple of select online retailers right now and watch out there are scalpers out there for this thing then there's a vetro v5 and the snowman mt6s but be warned guys shipping costs for the snowman can get completely out of control if you live outside of aliexpress's free shipping zones trust me i found out the hard way you can see that in the full review after that comes the arctic freezer 30 co and the id cooling se224xt at 30 bucks and stepping up another five dollars will get you into the territory for the gammaxx 400 v2 and the legendary hyper 212 evo finally there's the freezer 34 esports pure rock 2 tough air 310 and the hyper 212 black edition all clustered around that 40 price point and that u12 s well that goes for a cool 70 bucks right now but look a lot of these things go on sale pretty regularly and that's why i wanted to bring that lowest price into this whole equation so what were those lowest prices over the last 12 months well things actually change up quite a lot suddenly the id cooling sc224xt and the 212 evo sit at just 25 and they're followed by the mt6s and pure rock slim 2. the vetro v5 and freezer 34 though last i looked they've already reached their lowest prices right now on the other hand the gammaxx 400 v2 and the hyper 202 black edition seem to regularly go on sale for pretty discounted prices if you want to pick them up after seeing this roundup the rest of the coolers here haven't really moved all that much from their original prices but if you do happen to find it there's some pretty good deals out there for the u12s and those brought it's priced down to just 54. now just 54 is still pretty pricey for this roundup all right so i wanted to get into all the details now of the six new coolers that we just brought in but with that being said there's a couple of things that are common across almost every single one of the budget coolers that you're going to be looking at first of all they've all got a heat pipe direct touch base the other thing is that they all have pre-applied thermal compound or they have just enough thermal compound included for one single application or maybe two applications in some cases if you can squeeze that two for all your worth the other thing is that they're all 120 millimeters other than the little 92 millimeter be quiet that i have right here so i think that's pretty much everything i wanted to cover in general so for all intents and purposes the arctic freezer 34co and its esports version are pretty much the same cooler but are actually meant for very different price points but while the freezer 34co is a more raw copper and aluminum look the esports version comes in a bunch of different color combinations from this blackout version to an all-white edition and even some with some color accents on their fans but it's there that there's the biggest difference and that's in the fans while the co comes with a pretty basic model the esports steps things up a huge amount and use an upgraded fan that has better noise airflow and static pressure and that'll allow it to get a lot lower temperatures in some cases one other thing i wanted to mention is these two arctic coolers have bases with the smallest contact area in this roundup it feels like they were created for intel cpus with smaller ihs's but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to have any issues with amd now moving on to the pure rock 2 and i'd call this be quiet's most basic air cooler other than the tiny little pure rock slim 2 i've been talking about but overall what i wanted to mention here is that even though most of this cooler is really well built its finra just feels a little bit chintzy with that being said it has the densest fin array here and to push through that be quiet add their purewings to fan which is near silent but it pushes a whole ton of air and then we come to this the gammaxx v2 and look the entire gammaxx range is just massive and i need a whole separate video to cover them all but after talking to deepcool directly here's the lowdown these are all essentially the same cooler with the only real difference being the fan led colors and a few aesthetic changes here and there like a cleaner looking top plate on more pricey models the one i have here though is the 400 v2 with a blue led fan that should be representative of the entire lineup and there's nothing too remarkable about this one either look it's a 120 millimeter air cooler that looks pretty much like every other one but the one thing i need to mention here is that after going through a whole three of these the base finishing quality is consistently the worst in this roundup it might look good on camera but one or two of the heat pipes are always slightly torqued in one direction or another and that prevents it from making full contact with the cpu this next cooler is probably the most requested one i've seen since i started doing these affordable heatsink reviews and it's the id cooling se224xt basic now there's also a black and white version but the only thing those changes really with the color and everything else is the same other than the fact that they cost a little bit more but i've gotta say for the price everything about this thing's build quality impressed me it feels sturdy on paper at least the fan has some of the best specs in this roundup and while it's a bit hard to capture on camera somehow id cooling managed to polish this thing's base to an almost mirror finish and getting that on an hdt base isn't easy i was wondering why so many people were talking about this thing and well i guess i see why now but the last cooler that i wanted to talk about is also the newest here and that's the tough air 310 which was just released a few weeks ago with this thermaltake is really really hoping to go head-to-head against some of those popular coolers here like the freezer 34 esports the gamex and the hyper two and two black edition they're also bringing a really interesting design to the table with that clean looking top plate and a simple straightforward black and gray aesthetic but other than that i need to mention that the tough air 310 also has the easiest way to mount a fan with a pair of plastic clips that get screwed into place rather than a couple of metal brackets that you have to fiddle around with now another thing you probably notice is how damn slim this cooler's fin array is it actually feels like thermaltake is betting on maximizing air movement rather than just brute size here now speaking of how slim that tough air 310 is what about the other coolers what about their sizes are these going to fit in your case so i really wanted to get into that by diving a little bit deeper into the biggest the smallest and the most compact of these coolers and the thickest one here by a long shot that award goes to the pure rock 2. but look guys don't worry about it causing any type of memory compatibility issues since the slanted heat pipes make sure the fan won't come into contact with any of the memory slots actually to be honest with you none of the coolers here had any conflicts with higher dimms the tough air on the other hand might be the slimmest here but it's also the highest at about 160 millimeters high because of that plastic top plate meanwhile the shortest of the bunch is actually the vetro v5 at just millimeters now what about all the other coolers well they're actually stuck between that 148 millimeters of the veteran v5 and the 160 millimeters of the tough air of course look there's that little pure rock slim 2 which is the outlier since it's only 92 millimeters moving on to installation well look i didn't want this video to go three hours long so i'm not going to individually install each and every single one of these coolers but i'm going to talk to you a little bit about some of the highlights some of the low light some of the issues that you might encounter and there's actually one or two here that have some of the best installation processes i've ever seen on a budget air cooler on the flip side of that coin if you want to see the more detailed installation processes for these sort of five coolers over here by all means go check them out because some of them are real winners and losers but what makes a winner first of all there's three things that make up a really good installation package in my opinion first of all there's clear instructions then there's also making sure that there's the smallest number of components possible because no one and i mean no one wants to be fumbling around with a million tiny little itty bitty pieces and finally the last so important item is having a secure mount personally i think the best type is when a manufacturer actually pre-installs a crossbar and its associated screws into place like id cooling did with the sc224xt that's taking a page from knock to his book and it gets absolute top marks for me because everything is there ready to go meanwhile the arctic cooling freezer series the gammaxx the 212 black edition and the veteran v5 all have a sort of variation on that process where you mount the retention arms yourself and then secure those into place i'm totally okay with that since it's pretty straightforward but i'm not a huge fan of the installation on the pure rock 2 or the tough air since you actually need to balance that crossbar like a tightrope walker and then used two really really small screws to secure it into place on the retention bracket the other coolers well they all had some small issues that i need to bring up the mt6 well it uses a pretty easy but completely insecure plastic mounting clip system that's really wonky as hell on the other hand the be quiet pure ox limp 2 well it sort of fails in the security department because it uses a push pin installation for intel and that's a lot of weight to be hanging off of just a regular push pin now the 212 evo i have to bash that a little bit because the one that we have here it uses the old installation kit that has a massive kit of tiny parts but cooler master has gradually improved that with new revision so i would really recommend going to one of those ones instead of the original two into evo if you want a little bit less pain when it comes to installation and that's pretty much all there is to talk about that now the next thing i wanted to get into is the performance and there's a ton of things that need to be talked about here so this i don't know it might end up being the longest section robert behind the camera is basically thinking but anyways so what we're going to do is we're going to go through each and every single one of these new coolers individually in noise normalized charts and then sort of like round them all up at certain decibel levels and i also want to quickly explain these charts again first of all we're testing at three different loads that's 95 watts 125 watts and 150 watts meanwhile the y-axis shows temperatures while the x-axis shows the decibel readings for each cooler this allows us to graph how a cooler performs relative to its noise output across a bunch of different scenarios also we consider anything above 39 decibels in our closed test system to be overly loud and when it comes to this system we treat anything above 90 degrees as a failure so the best coolers will have a line that's low in the temperature side and short on the decibel side but you also have to remember that some good coolers can still get really loud but also be ultra efficient at lower noise levels and you're actually going to see some of those here but i also know some of you guys have been asking about why some of our charts don't actually start at zero and that's because of this yep the differences between these coolers are so minimal in a lot of situations so usually less than five degrees and that's why we need to zoom in to a certain temperature bracket anyways let's get started here with the freezer 30 co which does get pretty respectable results and it also has one of the quietest fans around topping out at just 39 decibels and yet at similar noise levels it's still beaten by the tough air 310 and the se-224xt but only by a couple of degrees at the most but those two also offer better performance if you're willing to crank up their fan speeds as a matter of fact the two to force fan can actually get the loudest of any cooler here by a long shot meanwhile the game x400 v2 posts good low noise results but its performance only picks up above 39 decibels while the pure rock 2 is a solid middle of the pack performer but that's not really what we wanted to see from a 40 cooler and what about that freezer 34 esports everyone's been raving about well it has amazing performance and it's damn quiet too now let's line everything up and i mean everything at a 38 decibel sweet spot and yeah the freezer 34 esports is simply the best cooler i've tested so far at 95 watts along with the snowman mt6s then the tough air 310 pure rock 2 and 224 xt are following really really closely behind then after that we have a bunch of other coolers at 64 degrees including that noctua u12s then there's the slim 2 and the hyper 212 black which bring up the rear but let's be honest here with only 4 degrees separating the best and supposedly worst coolers it's pretty obvious a lot of this is simply within the margin of error and 95 watts just isn't stressing these things at all so let's move on to 125 watts to see what happens and starting with the freezer 34 co again you can see what that extra 30 watts does it'll add a good 12 to 15 degrees to the results of a lot of these coolers this actually feels like the sweet spot for thermal takes tough air 310 because these results look good and they'll stay the best as we go through with the other heatsinks the 224xt is also extremely competitive here but just make sure you manually set its fan speed because we've noticed a lot of motherboards will set on a percentage basis and at 50 this thing sure it gets great results but it's also really really loud and based on its current price right now i'd actually say the gammaxx 400 v2 ends up being a bit of a disappointment because it ended up with the highest overall temperatures but in order to get competitive it needed to get screaming loud and finally there's a pure rock 2 and the freezer 34 esports both of those get extremely similar results but the freezer does end up having a slight edge across every single noise level and considering the size difference between those two that's really saying something and drilling down into that 38 decibel noise level again and what you'll see here is another pretty close race with that tough air leading by a single degree over the u12s but this is also where the u12s starts really showing its strengths it's a cooler designed from the ground up for higher wattage cpus then stuck at 77 degrees is the 224xt the freezer 34 esports the vetru and the snowman it's basically a log jam there then comes the pure rock 2 with a pretty solid middle of the pack performance along with the arctic co and there's also a pleasant little surprise here and that's the 92 millimeter slim 2 which almost equals the performance of its bigger and more expensive brother and then finally trailing the pack are the 400 v2 and the hyper 212s i do think that those 212s are starting to show their age just a bit right about now and finally we have 150 watts which is actually more than some of these heat sinks are rated for so yeah a few of them will fail and that's what happened with the freezer 34 co the tough air also failed but then it got going with some results that were under the threshold the only problem here is that it needs some pretty high fan speeds to get under 88 degrees look personally i think the biggest shock came with the id cooling 224 xt basic i mean look 88 degrees is still way too hot for my liking but if you do crank its fan speeds up and yes it has those additional rpms in the tank it actually dominates would i want my cooler running that loud though no absolutely not but it's got it it can do it then the gamex is in the same position as the tough air 310 it needs to rely on its fans spinning at insanely high speeds to compensate for its lack of thermal mass but then there are two more surprises the pure rock 2's big size obviously means that it has more thermal mass so it gets the same results as the gammaxx while running almost whisper quiet and the freezer 34 esports gets out of failure pretty quick too with even better results than the be quiet but like i said noctua absolutely loves higher wattages so in a way you get what you pay for if you have a higher end cpu i'm just blown away by the 224xt and the arctic esports which are so so close to that u12s the only other two coolers that could even pass this test at 38 decibels were the purerock ii and the snowman all the rest failed well wow guys this has been a long time coming it's been months of testing everybody here at the office has put in yeoman's work to get this one done but there's a couple of realizations that we've all come to when it comes to budget air coolers and no it's not you get what you pay for what it is is you simply need to temper your expectations when it comes to believing any cooler on the face of this planet is going to be sufficient for your cpu i mean look you're not hopefully going to think yes buying a 30 or 40 dollar cooler is going to be sufficient enough to cool a super expensive fire breathing 11900k or an overclocked 5900 series cpu from amd what you need to understand is that for 95 watts and below any of these coolers that we've covered here is going to be good enough for you it's all going to come down to price now i don't know if this is just a matter of cheap coolers getting good or good coolers getting less expensive but what we have here is some really impressive results right across the board now i know there's one thing that a lot of people are gonna ask me and even some of the guys here at the office asked me is is there a top three and yes there is and i'm willing to put my foot into this and make some suggestions number one i did want to give an honorable mention to the tough air 310 and yes i know that there's a lot of people out there who have criticism about thermaltake but this thing did perform very very well for forty dollars and i'm sure you can be able to find it on sale as time goes on for even less than that but if there is that top three i would have to say that the winner of this whole thing right now for me that is the se224xt if you can find this thing for the 28 to 25 dollars that it's usually going for it is really uh it surprised me then i would actually say that the vetro v2 is another really good option it just performed well across the board for its price and finally there's the arctic esports from a price to performance perspective and for the silence this thing is probably the way that you're going to want to go and also availability it's available all over the place so i guess this is it i mean this is almost emotional for me and i think this for me is the conclusion to almost a journey i hope you guys enjoyed it i hope this will guide you to make better informed purchasing decisions and i guess i'll see you in the next one have a good one guysokay everybody this is one that i am ultra excited for and this is not like a fake youtube excited this is actually really exciting because if you guys have been watching the channel for the last couple of months you've been seeing that i've gone into budget air cooling reviews pretty hardcore we've we've reviewed a bunch of them it's actually really near and dear to my heart because my first pc was just done with a basic budget air cooler and that was like 20 years ago now so i understand that air coolers are something that a lot of you are choosing in order to save a couple of bucks in your pcs now is that necessarily a good thing well from the ones that i've reviewed so far some of these can actually perform really really well a lot better than even i expected so what i wanted to do is i wanted to have like this compendium review and that would be rounding up a bunch of budget air coolers now there's going to be the old ones that i already tested and a bunch of new ones some of these are actually newly released on the market i want to get to all of that including the price points including the performance and a lot of other information right after a message from our sponsor well well well small package but with a lot of responsibility the newly sp750 power supply brings performance to the sfx space with a fully modular design and complementing low profile cables the 750 watt 80 plus gold unit should satisfy most sff needs especially with a zero rpm mode under 40 load and this pretty elegant exposed aluminum housing it's about the size the power and where it comes from check out the sp 750 sfx power supply down below so with that out of the way i wanted to just mention very quickly this is going to be a bit of a longer video so if there's a cooler or some information that you want and you are looking for specific bits and pieces of this video please timestamps are in the description below and in the timeline so let's set up some ground rules about how i went into this video so first of all none of these coolers is on average over 40 dollars u.s and yes some of them are going to be a little bit more expensive depending on the regions that you're in the second thing is that all of these actually need it to be available to buy and that's a little bit of a harder thing right now in the given market conditions now in total we've got 11 coolers and it's almost impossible to get every single one of these quote-unquote budget air coolers on the market there's dozens and dozens of them and it makes it almost impossible to put all into one video so what i wanted to do is go through the coolers that we've had right now and five of those i've actually reviewed in the past and those links are going to be down in the description below so first of all is the be quiet pure rock slim 2 there's also the vetro v5 there's the cooler master 212 black edition the hyper 212 evo and finally the aliexpress special the mt6s so these ones are gonna be put up against the brand new ones now look you don't need all the descriptions and everything else about these coolers go to those individual videos we're just going to sort of gloss over a lot of them in this video other than in the performance results now the new ones the new ones are some of the most iconic on the market right now that would be the arctic cooling freezer 34 esports the freezer 34 co which is a little bit more of a budget oriented option for that one there's also the pure rock 2 that's actually be quiet entry level 120 millimeter tower cooler right now then there's also the deepcool gammaxx 400 v2 and there's the really new kit on the block that would be the thermaltake tough air 310. and lastly there's the id cooling 224 xt basic which is actually a real surprise in this video now there are a couple things that i wanted to mention especially about pricing because from regent to region they can vary wildly so what i've done is i've put together yes a couple of charts that i hope illustrate this pretty well one of them is an average chart and this average basically what i did is i went across a bunch of retailers and found the average cost for these coolers right now when we're making the video then what i also did is i went and i found the lowest cost that has been for these coolers in the last 12 months but you also have to take these prices that you're going to see with a little grain of salt because remember we're making this video a couple of days before you're actually seeing it so those prices may have changed so obviously the pure rock slim ii is the lowest at just 26 bucks but its availability is actually limited to only a couple of select online retailers right now and watch out there are scalpers out there for this thing then there's a vetro v5 and the snowman mt6s but be warned guys shipping costs for the snowman can get completely out of control if you live outside of aliexpress's free shipping zones trust me i found out the hard way you can see that in the full review after that comes the arctic freezer 30 co and the id cooling se224xt at 30 bucks and stepping up another five dollars will get you into the territory for the gammaxx 400 v2 and the legendary hyper 212 evo finally there's the freezer 34 esports pure rock 2 tough air 310 and the hyper 212 black edition all clustered around that 40 price point and that u12 s well that goes for a cool 70 bucks right now but look a lot of these things go on sale pretty regularly and that's why i wanted to bring that lowest price into this whole equation so what were those lowest prices over the last 12 months well things actually change up quite a lot suddenly the id cooling sc224xt and the 212 evo sit at just 25 and they're followed by the mt6s and pure rock slim 2. the vetro v5 and freezer 34 though last i looked they've already reached their lowest prices right now on the other hand the gammaxx 400 v2 and the hyper 202 black edition seem to regularly go on sale for pretty discounted prices if you want to pick them up after seeing this roundup the rest of the coolers here haven't really moved all that much from their original prices but if you do happen to find it there's some pretty good deals out there for the u12s and those brought it's priced down to just 54. now just 54 is still pretty pricey for this roundup all right so i wanted to get into all the details now of the six new coolers that we just brought in but with that being said there's a couple of things that are common across almost every single one of the budget coolers that you're going to be looking at first of all they've all got a heat pipe direct touch base the other thing is that they all have pre-applied thermal compound or they have just enough thermal compound included for one single application or maybe two applications in some cases if you can squeeze that two for all your worth the other thing is that they're all 120 millimeters other than the little 92 millimeter be quiet that i have right here so i think that's pretty much everything i wanted to cover in general so for all intents and purposes the arctic freezer 34co and its esports version are pretty much the same cooler but are actually meant for very different price points but while the freezer 34co is a more raw copper and aluminum look the esports version comes in a bunch of different color combinations from this blackout version to an all-white edition and even some with some color accents on their fans but it's there that there's the biggest difference and that's in the fans while the co comes with a pretty basic model the esports steps things up a huge amount and use an upgraded fan that has better noise airflow and static pressure and that'll allow it to get a lot lower temperatures in some cases one other thing i wanted to mention is these two arctic coolers have bases with the smallest contact area in this roundup it feels like they were created for intel cpus with smaller ihs's but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to have any issues with amd now moving on to the pure rock 2 and i'd call this be quiet's most basic air cooler other than the tiny little pure rock slim 2 i've been talking about but overall what i wanted to mention here is that even though most of this cooler is really well built its finra just feels a little bit chintzy with that being said it has the densest fin array here and to push through that be quiet add their purewings to fan which is near silent but it pushes a whole ton of air and then we come to this the gammaxx v2 and look the entire gammaxx range is just massive and i need a whole separate video to cover them all but after talking to deepcool directly here's the lowdown these are all essentially the same cooler with the only real difference being the fan led colors and a few aesthetic changes here and there like a cleaner looking top plate on more pricey models the one i have here though is the 400 v2 with a blue led fan that should be representative of the entire lineup and there's nothing too remarkable about this one either look it's a 120 millimeter air cooler that looks pretty much like every other one but the one thing i need to mention here is that after going through a whole three of these the base finishing quality is consistently the worst in this roundup it might look good on camera but one or two of the heat pipes are always slightly torqued in one direction or another and that prevents it from making full contact with the cpu this next cooler is probably the most requested one i've seen since i started doing these affordable heatsink reviews and it's the id cooling se224xt basic now there's also a black and white version but the only thing those changes really with the color and everything else is the same other than the fact that they cost a little bit more but i've gotta say for the price everything about this thing's build quality impressed me it feels sturdy on paper at least the fan has some of the best specs in this roundup and while it's a bit hard to capture on camera somehow id cooling managed to polish this thing's base to an almost mirror finish and getting that on an hdt base isn't easy i was wondering why so many people were talking about this thing and well i guess i see why now but the last cooler that i wanted to talk about is also the newest here and that's the tough air 310 which was just released a few weeks ago with this thermaltake is really really hoping to go head-to-head against some of those popular coolers here like the freezer 34 esports the gamex and the hyper two and two black edition they're also bringing a really interesting design to the table with that clean looking top plate and a simple straightforward black and gray aesthetic but other than that i need to mention that the tough air 310 also has the easiest way to mount a fan with a pair of plastic clips that get screwed into place rather than a couple of metal brackets that you have to fiddle around with now another thing you probably notice is how damn slim this cooler's fin array is it actually feels like thermaltake is betting on maximizing air movement rather than just brute size here now speaking of how slim that tough air 310 is what about the other coolers what about their sizes are these going to fit in your case so i really wanted to get into that by diving a little bit deeper into the biggest the smallest and the most compact of these coolers and the thickest one here by a long shot that award goes to the pure rock 2. but look guys don't worry about it causing any type of memory compatibility issues since the slanted heat pipes make sure the fan won't come into contact with any of the memory slots actually to be honest with you none of the coolers here had any conflicts with higher dimms the tough air on the other hand might be the slimmest here but it's also the highest at about 160 millimeters high because of that plastic top plate meanwhile the shortest of the bunch is actually the vetro v5 at just millimeters now what about all the other coolers well they're actually stuck between that 148 millimeters of the veteran v5 and the 160 millimeters of the tough air of course look there's that little pure rock slim 2 which is the outlier since it's only 92 millimeters moving on to installation well look i didn't want this video to go three hours long so i'm not going to individually install each and every single one of these coolers but i'm going to talk to you a little bit about some of the highlights some of the low light some of the issues that you might encounter and there's actually one or two here that have some of the best installation processes i've ever seen on a budget air cooler on the flip side of that coin if you want to see the more detailed installation processes for these sort of five coolers over here by all means go check them out because some of them are real winners and losers but what makes a winner first of all there's three things that make up a really good installation package in my opinion first of all there's clear instructions then there's also making sure that there's the smallest number of components possible because no one and i mean no one wants to be fumbling around with a million tiny little itty bitty pieces and finally the last so important item is having a secure mount personally i think the best type is when a manufacturer actually pre-installs a crossbar and its associated screws into place like id cooling did with the sc224xt that's taking a page from knock to his book and it gets absolute top marks for me because everything is there ready to go meanwhile the arctic cooling freezer series the gammaxx the 212 black edition and the veteran v5 all have a sort of variation on that process where you mount the retention arms yourself and then secure those into place i'm totally okay with that since it's pretty straightforward but i'm not a huge fan of the installation on the pure rock 2 or the tough air since you actually need to balance that crossbar like a tightrope walker and then used two really really small screws to secure it into place on the retention bracket the other coolers well they all had some small issues that i need to bring up the mt6 well it uses a pretty easy but completely insecure plastic mounting clip system that's really wonky as hell on the other hand the be quiet pure ox limp 2 well it sort of fails in the security department because it uses a push pin installation for intel and that's a lot of weight to be hanging off of just a regular push pin now the 212 evo i have to bash that a little bit because the one that we have here it uses the old installation kit that has a massive kit of tiny parts but cooler master has gradually improved that with new revision so i would really recommend going to one of those ones instead of the original two into evo if you want a little bit less pain when it comes to installation and that's pretty much all there is to talk about that now the next thing i wanted to get into is the performance and there's a ton of things that need to be talked about here so this i don't know it might end up being the longest section robert behind the camera is basically thinking but anyways so what we're going to do is we're going to go through each and every single one of these new coolers individually in noise normalized charts and then sort of like round them all up at certain decibel levels and i also want to quickly explain these charts again first of all we're testing at three different loads that's 95 watts 125 watts and 150 watts meanwhile the y-axis shows temperatures while the x-axis shows the decibel readings for each cooler this allows us to graph how a cooler performs relative to its noise output across a bunch of different scenarios also we consider anything above 39 decibels in our closed test system to be overly loud and when it comes to this system we treat anything above 90 degrees as a failure so the best coolers will have a line that's low in the temperature side and short on the decibel side but you also have to remember that some good coolers can still get really loud but also be ultra efficient at lower noise levels and you're actually going to see some of those here but i also know some of you guys have been asking about why some of our charts don't actually start at zero and that's because of this yep the differences between these coolers are so minimal in a lot of situations so usually less than five degrees and that's why we need to zoom in to a certain temperature bracket anyways let's get started here with the freezer 30 co which does get pretty respectable results and it also has one of the quietest fans around topping out at just 39 decibels and yet at similar noise levels it's still beaten by the tough air 310 and the se-224xt but only by a couple of degrees at the most but those two also offer better performance if you're willing to crank up their fan speeds as a matter of fact the two to force fan can actually get the loudest of any cooler here by a long shot meanwhile the game x400 v2 posts good low noise results but its performance only picks up above 39 decibels while the pure rock 2 is a solid middle of the pack performer but that's not really what we wanted to see from a 40 cooler and what about that freezer 34 esports everyone's been raving about well it has amazing performance and it's damn quiet too now let's line everything up and i mean everything at a 38 decibel sweet spot and yeah the freezer 34 esports is simply the best cooler i've tested so far at 95 watts along with the snowman mt6s then the tough air 310 pure rock 2 and 224 xt are following really really closely behind then after that we have a bunch of other coolers at 64 degrees including that noctua u12s then there's the slim 2 and the hyper 212 black which bring up the rear but let's be honest here with only 4 degrees separating the best and supposedly worst coolers it's pretty obvious a lot of this is simply within the margin of error and 95 watts just isn't stressing these things at all so let's move on to 125 watts to see what happens and starting with the freezer 34 co again you can see what that extra 30 watts does it'll add a good 12 to 15 degrees to the results of a lot of these coolers this actually feels like the sweet spot for thermal takes tough air 310 because these results look good and they'll stay the best as we go through with the other heatsinks the 224xt is also extremely competitive here but just make sure you manually set its fan speed because we've noticed a lot of motherboards will set on a percentage basis and at 50 this thing sure it gets great results but it's also really really loud and based on its current price right now i'd actually say the gammaxx 400 v2 ends up being a bit of a disappointment because it ended up with the highest overall temperatures but in order to get competitive it needed to get screaming loud and finally there's a pure rock 2 and the freezer 34 esports both of those get extremely similar results but the freezer does end up having a slight edge across every single noise level and considering the size difference between those two that's really saying something and drilling down into that 38 decibel noise level again and what you'll see here is another pretty close race with that tough air leading by a single degree over the u12s but this is also where the u12s starts really showing its strengths it's a cooler designed from the ground up for higher wattage cpus then stuck at 77 degrees is the 224xt the freezer 34 esports the vetru and the snowman it's basically a log jam there then comes the pure rock 2 with a pretty solid middle of the pack performance along with the arctic co and there's also a pleasant little surprise here and that's the 92 millimeter slim 2 which almost equals the performance of its bigger and more expensive brother and then finally trailing the pack are the 400 v2 and the hyper 212s i do think that those 212s are starting to show their age just a bit right about now and finally we have 150 watts which is actually more than some of these heat sinks are rated for so yeah a few of them will fail and that's what happened with the freezer 34 co the tough air also failed but then it got going with some results that were under the threshold the only problem here is that it needs some pretty high fan speeds to get under 88 degrees look personally i think the biggest shock came with the id cooling 224 xt basic i mean look 88 degrees is still way too hot for my liking but if you do crank its fan speeds up and yes it has those additional rpms in the tank it actually dominates would i want my cooler running that loud though no absolutely not but it's got it it can do it then the gamex is in the same position as the tough air 310 it needs to rely on its fans spinning at insanely high speeds to compensate for its lack of thermal mass but then there are two more surprises the pure rock 2's big size obviously means that it has more thermal mass so it gets the same results as the gammaxx while running almost whisper quiet and the freezer 34 esports gets out of failure pretty quick too with even better results than the be quiet but like i said noctua absolutely loves higher wattages so in a way you get what you pay for if you have a higher end cpu i'm just blown away by the 224xt and the arctic esports which are so so close to that u12s the only other two coolers that could even pass this test at 38 decibels were the purerock ii and the snowman all the rest failed well wow guys this has been a long time coming it's been months of testing everybody here at the office has put in yeoman's work to get this one done but there's a couple of realizations that we've all come to when it comes to budget air coolers and no it's not you get what you pay for what it is is you simply need to temper your expectations when it comes to believing any cooler on the face of this planet is going to be sufficient for your cpu i mean look you're not hopefully going to think yes buying a 30 or 40 dollar cooler is going to be sufficient enough to cool a super expensive fire breathing 11900k or an overclocked 5900 series cpu from amd what you need to understand is that for 95 watts and below any of these coolers that we've covered here is going to be good enough for you it's all going to come down to price now i don't know if this is just a matter of cheap coolers getting good or good coolers getting less expensive but what we have here is some really impressive results right across the board now i know there's one thing that a lot of people are gonna ask me and even some of the guys here at the office asked me is is there a top three and yes there is and i'm willing to put my foot into this and make some suggestions number one i did want to give an honorable mention to the tough air 310 and yes i know that there's a lot of people out there who have criticism about thermaltake but this thing did perform very very well for forty dollars and i'm sure you can be able to find it on sale as time goes on for even less than that but if there is that top three i would have to say that the winner of this whole thing right now for me that is the se224xt if you can find this thing for the 28 to 25 dollars that it's usually going for it is really uh it surprised me then i would actually say that the vetro v2 is another really good option it just performed well across the board for its price and finally there's the arctic esports from a price to performance perspective and for the silence this thing is probably the way that you're going to want to go and also availability it's available all over the place so i guess this is it i mean this is almost emotional for me and i think this for me is the conclusion to almost a journey i hope you guys enjoyed it i hope this will guide you to make better informed purchasing decisions and i guess i'll see you in the next one have a good one guys\n"