Gadgetory

hey everyone this is Steve from gamers Nexus dotnet and today we are looking at silverstone Zargon a r01 CPU cooler which is priced firmly in the thirty five dollar range right near the hyper 212 and respire t forty and both of those we've reviewed previously check the channel for those as always let's hit on the hard specs before jumping into opinions and thermal data you'll find the full review linked below complete with all the benchmark data and images i'm about to discuss first of all silverstone Zargon series of coolers chips and three skews a r01 a r 0 2 and a r 0 3 we tested the AR 0 1 argon cooler and these coolers are each purpose-built for different socket types though they're all intercomparison physical size of the cpu fluctuates with the pin count which is signified by the socket numbers so 1155 1150 2011 and so on and generally it's advisable to seek out a CPU cooler that fits perfectly atop the integrated heat spreader on the CPU or IHS if you buy a massive cooler that's meant for server products or x-class CPUs and mount it to a Haswell chip then it'll still work it's just going to be inefficient and price and effective neither of those are desirable the same is true for the reverse mounting a respire t20 which has one of these smallest cold plates I've ever seen to a massive LGA 2011 chip is going to run pretty warm so for the same reason you don't want to do that by seating the heat pipes the copper heat pipes more directly atop the IHS we can conduct heat more efficiently from the IH IH s into the capillaries and this is partly because first of all copper has about two times the thermal conductivity of aluminum so that's a big part of it and then of course the heat pipes themselves will be more effective at their jobs like many modern heat sinks the argon coolers use direct contact cold blades with smooth mounting surfaces so there aren't any cracks between the heat pipes and aluminum base plate as found in some cheaper coolers and this helps with thermal dissipation efficiency by maximizing the contact of the IHS and minimizing the demand for a thermal interface ie compound fill the cracks the a r01 is recommended for CPUs with a similar pin count to IV bridges 1155 pins including as well as LGA 1150 socket so if you're running 1150 oven 55 generally 11 5 X you want the AR 0 1 if you're running 1366 or 2011 which are much larger you want AR 0 3 and then I believe the AR AR 0 2 cooler is a little bit smaller form factor for those special instances where you need it and the AR 0 1 itself is built with three eight millimeter copper heat pipes and a large copper heatsink the aluminum heatsink has a fin design that increases air turbulence to prohibit intake air from escaping too early in the dissipation process so the the retention of that colder air is much better with this cooler than others you'll find positioning available for two fans on the CPU cooler each mounted with a rubber tab rather than plastic sliders that break and our testing has found that the air stream was fully saturated by just the stock fan at least in the instance of our bench so the stock fan does use a high probe airing and delivers roughly 55 CFM at 24 decibels making for a relatively low overall noise threshold and moderate power let's hit those benchmarks you'll find our full test methodology in the article linked below but the short of it is that we run prime95 instances with l FF T's on 4 threads to generate maximum heat and load and the CPU is OC to 4.4 gigahertz with a V core of roughly 1.7 5 volts RAM is up around 2400 megahertz we disable all automatic fan speed controls for the purposes of these tests and I ran the AR 0 1 through with both stock and aftermarket controlled thermal compounds so this helps to set all the coolers on a similar baseline so we can judge their actual design and also judge if you need to buy your own compound then I tested it again with the dual fan configuration and and we'll talk about those settings in a second so here's the stock chart as shown in this chart the AR 0 1 performs that nearly on par with the NZXT crack and x-48 CLC and easily beats out all other air coolers on the bench including the hyper 212 plus and respired t40 which are priced similarly the air coolers aren't that surprising in terms of what it beats but the CLC probably sees similar performance on the silent setting anyway due to the efficiency of our test setup if you were to Ovie to 1.3 volts and run a baton of 4.8 gigahertz clock or higher you'd probably see a bigger gap developing between liquid and air and I would assume with the x40 retaining more of its advantage there still are benches purpose-built for real-world test scenarios and this means intermediate system builders are in mind you're not and insane overclocked or if you're using this type of setup so if you're mirroring our target bench that a r01 is easily the best buy at its price on our entire bench suite and if you don't need liquid for any particular reason then this generally is advisable over most liquid just for the cost benefit the differences between the stock and aftermarket compound tests are within one Celsius and because the stock compound is already 5 watts per meter Kelvin there's really no reason to opt for aftermarket cooling pastes rather unless you go for more extreme overclocking maybe something like Diamond compound would be preferable for that as for multi fan tests we found the improvement was within margin of error only 1c and this is likely due to the airstream being fully saturated as is on the bench as I discussed overall the build quality of the air zero one is superb the price point is excellent and it has effectively dethroned the respire T 40 which previously dethroned the hyper 212 as our highest recommended air cooler if you're trying to buy a cooler in the $30 price range plus or minus 10 bucks the AR 0 1 is definitely what I'd recommend that said you can normally grab the respire t44 just under $20 lately which makes its value significantly better if you need budget-friendly parts really you can't go wrong with either cooler though and that's all for now I will see you all next time peace