Air Coolers Are Getting Impressive: Deepcool AK620 Cooler Review

[Music] reviewing air coolers lately has actually gotten really interesting we have even more interesting ones coming up after this too because they have finally gotten to a much cheaper price point where higher end dual tower designs that are actually efficient and not just brute forcing their cooling have come down closer to the sixty to seventy dollar mark we saw that with the scifuma two really overall good cooler that we were happy to recommend and now we're looking at the deep coil ak620 this one has done well too in testing thus far it is a direct competitor to the fuma 2 so that's your direct uh alternative and it comes in cheaper than an hd15 normally anyway now the last time we looked at a deep cool product i didn't go so well for deep cool our our biggest challenge for deepcool in that one was simply evaluating whether the marketing was full of lies and it was for the assassin 3 where deepcole claimed that the heat pipes were centered and grooved or what commonly is referred to as a composite but instead they were just centered it was kind of a weird thing to burn your entire reputation over because the end result is not actually that different but when we cut the heat pipes open which apparently deep deepcool thought no one would ever do we saw that the marketing wasn't even close to being defensible so this is our first time looking at another deep cool product since and we are much more hopeful for this one because the marketing has been dialed back a lot on the claims before that this video is brought to you by evga's x-570 dark motherboard the evga x570 dark is a high-end motherboard for am4 cpus built around extreme overclocking and tested heavily by ebj's kin pen the x570 dark has a uniquely rotated socket and ram layout 90 degree rotated cables for ease of installation and management and tons of troubleshooting features to make building testing and overclocking easier check out evj's x570 dark high end motherboard at the link in the description below so this cooler doesn't do anything fancy with marketing it's a straight shooter it's a dual tower cooler it's got two 120 millimeter fans and these fans are new for the ak-620 these fans specifically are called the deep cool 120s oh you pronounce the letters individually these are the fk 120s i thought you were supposed to sort of pronounce it as it was written but anyway uh this is a 70 msrp we've seen it for about 65 on amazon but we've also seen it bouncing around in price a lot third-party sellers commonly sell it for 90 at that price point you're in direct competition with the nhd15 which is now very old it's starting to show its age but it also shows how well it was built when it first came out this is much better value at 60 to 70. we'll review it from that perspective but we'll talk about what to do if it's above that as we get towards the end here direct competition we're mostly going to be drawing comparisons to will be the scythe puma 2 it's about a 60 cooler it's two fans as well we'll be looking at the assassin 3 previously and we'll be looking at a couple of the like the nhd15 we'll get one or two of the liquid coolers in here as we go and of course the charts have the usual like 10 plus coolers on them if you want to pause them and look at your own comparisons so ak 620 in terms of marketing it doesn't do much which we think is good because this is a relatively simple product that can stand on its own merits pretty easily if it has them uh it advertises a 260 watt capacity quick note on this cooler companies all measure that number a little differently some of them will use a dummy heater which is perfectly fine but it means that you can only really draw comparisons within the same company's product stack so if nocto for example they don't really do this anymore but if noctua or maybe deepcore whoever claims 260 watts on one product and 200 watts on the other within their own family of products you can compare which is better that way but you wouldn't be able to say deepcool says it can do 260 watts this other company says it can do 200 watts therefore deepcool is better it's not that simple and also that number doesn't necessarily correlate to the tdp of the cpu as you've seen in our intel pieces where we talk about tau and boosting and amd pieces where we talk about the uh disgustingly uh complex formula for determining tdp which doesn't have power anywhere in it so just wanted everyone to be aware of that as you go into this the numbers we care about are the ones that go into the actual cpu that's being used to generate the heat enough of that let's get started with talking about the mechanics the installation will go through thermals pressure surface flatness and more let's talk about the mechanics and the design of the deepcool ak620 of it this is a large dual tower design it measures at 129 millimeters wide it's 138 millimeters long and the height is 160 millimeters now this height is a disqualifying factor for fitting into a lot of the truly mid-tower atx cases or some of the smaller mid towers but it's no problem for obviously the larger full towers and some of the larger mid towers so just be careful when you're choosing your case a lot of them cap out at 150 to 155. there's a 47 millimeter ram clearance with the front fan installed so it'll be compatible with most memory modules without taller heat spreaders without the front fan there's 55 millimeters of clearance but this comes at the cost of performance the fans are also able to be adjusted upwards in the case of ram with tall heat spreaders which is a feature we expect to see on a cooler like this so you can still accommodate the taller ram but then you'll lose one some efficiency and two you'll push obviously the cooler closer to the side panel which may be a problem for you the fk 120 fans are only available on this cooler and range from 500 to 1850 rpm plus or minus the normal 10 variance the fans also have a soft rubber square on each of the corners which is used to contact the heatsink and the fan clips to reduce vibration and noise especially noise transmission through those small clips the ak-620 also features a unique checkerboard heatsink pattern on the front and the back this doesn't do anything for performance it's just purely aesthetic and it helps differentiate it from other coolers it's visually interesting though we do actually like this overall and it shouldn't clash with any pc styles of course you also won't really be able to see it in most computers depending on the type of computer you're building but a standard layout is probably going to be sort of jammed in the back corner the plastic covers on the top of the heatsink on the other hand are visible in most computer designs and give the cooler a clean uniform and squared appearance when looking at the top of the cooler mike on our team our cooler technician who ran these tests finds the design to be quote beautiful and a welcome departure from the more industrial look we sometimes see just because this is subjective i'll throw my own opinion out there too i do prefer the industrial look and i like systems that are so functional that they look functional so obviously it all just comes down to what you prefer and we'll leave that up to you if you like it or not this section will explain installation if you're not interested in this section skip ahead a chapter and you can always return to this if you buy it we'll start with deepcool's am4 mountain the first step is to remove the stock plastic brackets from the top of the motherboard the ak620 utilizes the amd backplate so there's no need to remove it next take the four knurled standoffs with the black plastic on the bottom and screw them into the back plate which then secures them to the motherboard these bits of plastic help prevent damage to the motherboard that could cause shorts if they were to scratch it next place the motherboard brackets provided by deep cool in their respective orientation which would be c for m3 and d for am4 then fasten the brackets to the standoffs using the knurled nuts by hand and then consider tightening with a screwdriver but don't go overboard once you've applied the pre-included thermal paste place the cooler on top of the ihs and then secure it with the two captive nuts attached to a bracket that goes across the top of the cold plate using a phillips head screwdriver you can secure the spring-loaded cap to fasteners to the brackets these may require some pressure to begin threading though you can also loosen the plate that the captive fasteners are attached to via the solitary screw and the center of the coal plate just to circumvent having to compress the spring into the fasteners with an uncomfortable amount of force once you've started each fastener tighten them both down alternating as always every couple rotations until they stop and don't forget to re-tighten that center one either this mounting solution is easy to install so that's a big plus and it allows for consistent mounting pressure which we'll see later the fans go on last with so much standard wire mounts and attached to a 4-pin y adapter connector you could also of course connect them to the motherboard if you prefer as for intel lga mounting the procedure is the same except you have to use their supplied backplate from deepcool that is for the 1000 series sockets everything else is the same here for packaging and documentation the deepcool ak620 was pretty great overall all the hardware was accounted for this seems like a low bar but not every cooler passes more importantly there's no unnecessary single-use plastic in play with deepcool instead opting for reusable plastic bags this is something we like to see because it reduces waste makes packaging a little easier if you're going to repack it as well the rest of the packaging was similarly functional with lots of supportive cardboard and foam even having cutouts for the fan clips to be safely secured our mounting pressure scan across the ihs is next we test using a chemically reactive paper and a special expensive nist traceable scanner that was made possible through all of our supporters on patreon at patreon.com gamersnexus and those who buy our products like our 10 piece teardown toolkits our hud red and black mouse mats anti-static mod mats and other items from our gn store at store.gamersnexus.net thanks to all of you for making these tests possible this test primarily evaluates the pressure from the mounting mechanism rather than the flatness of the cold plate which we'll look at that part next the deepcool ak-620 has some interesting results here deepcoil advertises that the ak620 has a convex cold plate meaning that it's curved slightly outward or down towards the ihs with both the 3950x and the 3800x the ak-620s mounting pressure was centered in the middle of the ihs in both tests we saw less pressure on the left-hand side of the ihs with heavy contact dead center in fact in the 3950x test you can see a dark spot right over the center of the ihs which is where well it's right between the three dies the mounting pressure of the ak-620 is consistent across the middle with the equals convex cold plate design being clearly visible this lack of pressure across the top and bottom can work okay especially for a cooler that's handling a smaller ihs or a relatively moderate heat load like am4 lga 1200 options because the heat pipes still make good contact over an area where the dyes are located this would be much less efficient and potentially problematic as a design on threadripper style parts which really need that surface area to be leveraged to cool the high and distributed heat loads caused by those cpus but for the ak620s market this actually works really well our next test looks at the surface flatness of the cold plate this is done with an extremely precise needle and from a known zero point measured in microns delta from that zero point the test allows us to see the consistency of the surface helping to identify craters or manufacturing defects the deepcool ak620 ends up with a range roughly outside of the average where the point-to-point depth variation averages 13.5 microns for the ak620 for reference many of the other coolers we look at are 7 to 10 microns in average variation and depth point to point overall this result is fine it's nothing incredible it ranges from 3 to 39 microns so this places it around most of the other coolers in our data set but it's not really a head it's also not far behind overall the results are at best average time to start thermal testing we'll begin with our noise normalized 198 watt heat load with an overclocked amd r9 cpu this test is representative of most post tau intel case q cpus and overclocked amd r7 and r9 cpus which should be within the capabilities of the cooler as a reminder deepcool claims a 260 watt capacity for this but the way they measure that means really nothing we don't know what they're comparing it to there's a lot of different ways to take that number the deepcool ak620 will be under the most stress here out of all of our tests but given the dual tower nature of it it should be able to handle it here's the chart at 35 dba the ak-620 comes in at 57 degrees over ambient which would place it in the high 70s to low 80s when factoring in our room temperature of course it's not cold for a cpu under load but it's well within the acceptable range for normal operating temperatures and there's room to scale a little bit if you have a bad case or just dust over time compared to other dual towers this places the ak620 at two degrees cooler than the deep cool assassin three three degrees cooler than the scythe puma two at a similar price and within two degrees of the aging knocked with an hd15 compared to aios of course the best of those still hold a significantly like the liquid freezer 2 360 at 51 degrees but they're also generally a lot more expensive unless you're getting scalped on the ak620 for 100 but don't do that one final note about performance we tested the ak-620 with and without its top plastic covers we were mostly just curious if they might be trapping a significant amount of heat since some of the heat does actually a lot of heat comes off the top of the heat pipes as they protrude from the top plate in this test though they just don't cover enough surface area to make any difference so there's no statistically significant change here and they're not hindering performance in any meaningful way you can leave them on we will give credit though for just how easy they are to remove that's a big upside is ease of maintenance the next test is our 100 fan speed benchmark on the 198 watt heat load this test evaluates each cooler's maximum cooling performance under strain allowing coolers to run at full fan rpm coolers with more powerful or just more fans can stretch their legs here but they're typically louder we mark the dba level and the line names to help identify which coolers are more efficient so that would mean better performance at a relatively lower noise level than the competitors or less efficient and as always we use the included fans for all of the testing and all of these charts in this case though they're just set to 100 speed here's the chart at 100 fan speed with a 198 watt heat load the ak620 is at 54 degrees celsius over ambient and 42 dba at 20 inches distance this is only 3 degrees cooler than our 35 dba noise normalized test while being 7 dba louder as a reminder to the human ear a 10 dba increase is approximately a two times increase in perceived noise so this is a significant and noticeable increase in the perceived volume not quite at 2x but it's approaching it and just for the record a 3 db change although doubling in acoustic power by some measurements is not really the relevant measurement for human hearing in this test the ak620 directly ties with the assassin 3 compared to the fuma 2 the ak620 runs 6 degrees cooler that's thanks to a tire rpm the fuma 2 caps out at 34.4 dba so it's limited in its ability to scale up for higher heat loads the fuma 2 is a good cooler but the ak620 allows some additional headroom obviously at the cost of noise to scale with hotter cpus or with overclocking if you're willing to increase the fan speed up next we're looking at a 123 watt heat load with an amdr 7 cpu this test is representative of r7 non-ki-7 and k-sku i5 cpus as before for this test there's no change at all to the hardware other than to set a 35 dba system noise level in our noise control the lab and if you'd like to know more about our lab go check out our gn extras channel and especially our video of mike walking through the acoustic test booth we have one of these really cool acoustic chambers coming online as well for testing soon here's the chart at 35dba the deep cool ak620 comes in at 55 degrees celsius over ambient under load this places it at the same level as the assassin 3 and the scythe fuma 2. because this load isn't as intensive the coolers end up much closer together than in the 200 watt test the law of diminishing returns comes into play here competing dual tower coolers like the fuma 2 and the nhd15 run at about the same thermals making all three roughly equal options in this test except the pricing of course of the d15 is still higher the esports freezer 34 is also a very close competitor and worth considering at least for sort of the 120 watt and lower options the eka 0360 liquid millimeter cooler has only really been referenced here because the super high-end alternative this is only about three degrees cooler than the ak-620 and the reason for that isn't because liquid cooling doesn't work better it's because at these lower heat loads the limitations of the air coolers don't start to come into play as hard so the liquid cooler like the ekao scales far better for hotter cpus and has more headroom to deal with 200 watt plus heat loads up next is the same test but at 100 fan speed regardless of noise in this test the 620 is within the margin of error between the noctua nhd15 and the deep cool assassin 3 at 53 degrees celsius over ambient for the 620. however we need to consider the efficiency since they're now at max noise and that's not controlled anymore the ak620 was at 42.3 dba the d15 was at 43.9 and that's not really that noticeable to people but the assassin 3 was using significantly slower fans yet a louder noise level at 46 dba this has the ak620 as markedly more efficient than the assassin but similar to the d15 and this is also where liquid coolers often hold an advantage their efficiency they are far more efficient at a given noise level and so it can be reduced in speed to maintain the same temperature target and a much quieter noise level wrapping up then in comparison to other coolers we've tested the deepcool ak620 actually does really well in the testing this is why we're excited about some of the coolers we have coming up for review because i haven't looked through all the data yet but mike has already collected most of the data for a 21 air cooler that's actually looking very promising he's also looked at another dual tower dual fan cooler in the 40 to 50 range that's promising so we'll have those reviews coming up but it looks like right now is a pretty good time to get into air coolers at the high end the they're finally starting to become more affordable and some of that's probably because of volume so for the ak620 it's within margin of error of some of the other dual towers like the nhd15 sometimes the fuma 2 sometimes depending on the test conditions it's never worse in any meaningful way outside of error it is sometimes better at two to three degrees advantaged over the other dual tower coolers we've looked at at the for the products that we've recommended like the fuma 2 and in the past the d15 and 35 dba testing so noise normalized testing where everything is on an equal playing field except they have their own fans included that testing has the deep coil ak620 doing well also for pricing at 65 or 70 we do think this is actually very worth considering the direct alternative you should look at would be the scythevuma2 between them you're probably choosing somewhat on whatever you perceive the brand credibility of each company to be but also on the looks and beyond that there's not a lot of differences that really truly matter now if you're looking at this and you mostly find it for the 90 scallops price that we briefly saw online then it's a hard pass it is not worth that much money there's a reason msrp is 30 below that and you shouldn't really be paying that much at 90 you're so close to good liquid coolers at 97 for say uh as an example an eka i o 240 that the the liquid cooler starts to make more sense because you can run them at a lower noise level for a given thermal result and you end up with a more efficient cooler or you can just run the ekio at full tilt and obviously have more headroom for your thermals so we wouldn't do this at 90 the fuma 2 at 60 would make far more sense if this is 90 just to let everyone know that there are other factors outside of performance to consider one of them would be ongoing support so noctua has really earned its name here where as the coolers age it has done a phenomenal job at supplying mounting brackets for those coolers as new sockets come out like lga 1700 or whatever's up next from all the companies so that's something to consider here a deep cool currently does provide mounting kit upgrades for at least the coolers we've looked at recently and like noctua it offers them for free or if you can't prove you've purchased the cooler there's no proof of purchase you pay a couple bucks for the mounting kit and the shipping which is also not bad honestly so we do like to see that it's important because these things coolers they don't really go bad as we've said before it's just metal and then some fans which are easily replaceable if they happen to die and that's the only thing that might die and they generally don't so it's great to see companies support them going forward because it just produces unnecessary waste for your wallet and also just waste period if they're getting replaced because a company doesn't want to update the mounting bracket we can't review the future we don't know if they'll keep doing that don't know if deepquat will maintain that program but for now they have it the little bit of marketing claims that we did kind of look at were interesting so talk about the convex cold plate design this is something that companies typically do if they're working on a higher end cooler where they'll try to map the curvature or the concavity of the cold blade to the expected curvature concavity of an ihs intel and amd both curve their ihs slightly and so mapping it is not new but in this instance it's really easy to see it in our pressure testing results so that's kind of cool as well so overall the mounting system is easy to use it provides a secure mount and we didn't have any problems with it really the pricing is good if you get at msrp value is very competitive it is definitely worth considering over a fuma 2 or if you can't get one or the other either choice would be completely fine and the build quality we think is good on this one so you know deepcool welcome back to the not shady side of the market why don't you stick around here a while because this is a much better look for the company they've even gotten rid of their old logo the two-faced one like literally it was it was two faces it was like a little bit mixture of duplicitous and creepy looking uh new logo is much more befitting of deep cool if it sticks with the straightforward approach anyway uh looking good here we'll look at some more deep cool products and we have a couple of other reviews for coolers coming up as well so subscribe for that as always go to store.gamersnexus.net to help us out directly or patreon.com gamersnexus for some behind the scenes videos including some about our noise thermal and other testing in the lab we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 384,548

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, deepcool ak620, deepcool ak620 review, deepcool ak620 benchmarks, deepcool ak620 test, deepcool ak620 worth it, deepcool ak620 vs noctua nh-d15, deepcool ak620 amd, deepcool ak620 intel, best cpu air coolers, best cpu coolers 2022

Id: UGM6FcLDckk

Length: 22min 8sec (1328 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 21 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/bizude]

When I posted my results with the AK620 back in September, a lot of folks didn't believe me

I'm glad to see Steve's results in line with my own

https://reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/pnwt4m/deepcools_ak620_reviewed_nhd15_performance_but_30/

[u/AylmerIsRisen]

That's a genuinely surprising result for a 120mm cooler. I feel like the I'm exactly the target market here in saying that, too. That said, I have a minor change to suggest here (just in case Deep Cool drop by the thread):

If you are going 120mm I'd really like to see proper, no-fuss RAM clearance. If you are picking 120mm rather than 140mm it's probably because serviceability is a priority. Options here could be heat-pipes sloped back towards the rear of the case a little bit (Noctua have done something similar with a 140mm cooler but sloping the heat-pipes up to provide better GPU clearance), and/or a slimmer fan at the front as with the Scythe Fuma 2. Whatever you can get to work. You are most directly competing with things like the Scythe Fuma 2 or maybe the Noctua U12A (both 120mm), both of which have that absolutely down. Remember that.

Bonus feedback for Steve: If you could find a way to separate air coolers and water coolers in your charts that would be cool. These are two different markets, and I feel most buyers are will have made their decision and will not be actively comparing the two. Also ...it's kind of apples and oranges anyhow. Water coolers can just hold a lot more heat (which is a good thing), so will behave very differently re. temp limits and boosting behaviour, all that stuff. So the real performance difference in common workloads will not be reflected in your charts as presented.

[u/Jeep-Eep]

Never get me off air at this rate, outside of winning some kit with watercooling.

It's so good, and doesn't risk hosing down the innards of my rig with water.

[u/Jo3yization]

Awesome! After trying a Gammax Pro & seeing some early reviews of the AK620 I've been recommending it for the great performance & value since it's launch & it's amazing how often people would reference GN's air cooler reviews & not give much weight to the AK620 numbers being put up by other sites so they would still pick more expensive air & miss out on some huge value.

Here in Philippines Noctua & Scythe competition runs $20-50 higher & I'm sure we arent the only place, glad Steve finally had the chance to give Deepcool another look. Appreciate the testing.

[u/YoSmokinMan]

I've been waiting for the new d-15 for almost three years now it keeps getting pushed back this has me tempted. Currently I have a Hyper 212 on a 12700K limited to 140w.

[u/bubblesort33]

Kind of weird. With everything inflating in price, including metals, I would have not thought that prices of something like this would come down, even with large volume.

[u/imaginary_num6er]

Hope Noctua gets up to speed quick, since they've already lost ground to Phanteks on the high performance 120mm fan market. Really hope they launch their next gen 140mm fan in Q3 since I think that's the root-cause for why they are not as competitive of some of these recent coolers even with 2x 140mm fans

[u/bizzro]

Still missing the one thing I wish all air cooler reviews would start doing, "maximum heat load capacity".

Heat pipe coolers do not perform like a "solid block of metal" or a AIO for that matter where the temperature delta will just keep on increasing, and such the scaling continues "indefinitely". Technically you would reach the limit when the water starts boiling in the block and the heat sink melts, but I think we are outside usable temperature ranges at that point anyway! Heat pipes on the other hand have a maximum heat load capacity after which they more or less stop working. This is a clearly defined limit set by the "wicking speed" inside the pipe of the liquid.

That makes temperatures at lower heat loads somewhat useless as a indicator for thermal capacity. Because a thicker base to accomodate more heat pipes, can straight up lead to worse temperature at lower heat loads. But more/higher capacity heat pipes will give you a higher thermal capacity cieling.