Mega Size Air Cooler: Deepcool Assassin IV CPU Cooler Review & Benchmarks

[Music] we're back with a really high build quality air cooler today and it is a dual Tower dual fan but asymmetrical fan size solution the Deep cool assassin for its biggest weak point price it's about a hundred dollars but it aims to compete with even some of the lower end liquid coolers the Assassin 4 has strong points and mechanical design and usability but at 100 bucks its closest competition will be liquid coolers and the closest air cooler competition can be around 60 dollars cheaper like the thermal right Peerless assassin but the Assassin 4 does a lot that we like from a design build quality and functionality standpoint even if it's challenged on price and what deepcool is doing with the Assassin 4 right now is kind of similar to what fractal has done in the case Market which is overhaul the overall look and feel of the product and then charge more for it and hope that people will bite today we're going to be looking at The Thermals for this thing the Acoustics and of course pressure testing and flatness we'll be comparing it to some of the fiercest competitors in the air cooler market and some liquid cooling options let's get started before that this video is brought to you by thermal Grizzly thermal Grizzlies Hydra knot and cryonaut thermal paste are high performing thermal interfaces for use on CPUs and gpus you can bring an old card back to Peak Performance by replacing it and doing preventative maintenance and thermal Grizzlies Hydra knot is ideal for water Cooling and Air coolant for new and old cards alike cryonaut paste is one of the top performing pace for extreme overclocking with CPUs and gpus and has been used in several world record scoring machines learn more at the link in the description below the air cooler Market's gotten actually really exciting and unbelievably fierce in the last couple years where they've finally kind of cracked the code to getting dual Tower air coolers especially really competitive and able to sustain the higher heat loads that we have today and a lot of this is because thermal ride has reawoken and a lot of that is because thermalright is now manufacturing its own products in other words it is no longer working through contract factories and instead it does things first party or it is part of a first Party Factory that means they can get really cheap and deep cool is on the same camp Because deep cool makes its own products as well and actually it even manufactures some of the competing products and we can't name who but there are some fairly large Big Brand competitors to this that deep cool makes in its own factories now that Advantage is significant because it means that both of these companies can fight where a company like noctua for example will struggle because noctua gets at least one middle man in between the factory and its product let's fly over the Assassin Force feature the most obvious is that this dual Tower uses a reverse 120 millimeter fan on the backside to pull air through and a central 140 millimeter fan to draw air into the cooler the benefit of this 140 mil Central fan is that it's shifted downward keeping good compatibility for height clearance while still utilizing the 140 mil size to push air over the heat pipes and into the vrm area of the motherboard the front of the cooler doesn't include a fan so they're going for only the back and the center on this which is interesting I've removed the top plate here so you can see it however deep cool does include this fan bracket that that you can attach as far as we can tell any other 120 millimeter fan to it and it's got hole spacing that's standard for that the metal mesh top piece is for looks and it can be easily removed to reveal that 140 millimeter Central fan the central fan pulls out with some clips like this but that creates some compatibility issues that we'll talk about later in this video and Mike will head up that discussion the cooler looks large but it's a bulked up dual Tower design with a lot of plastic and mesh metal embellishments the actual fin stack is still sizable but it's smaller than the outside appearance would make it seem now part of this plastic is for flow guidance so these pieces here allow the air to get pushed through the fin stack rather than potentially escaping out the sides generally speaking this has caused problems in test in the past but it really depends on the static pressure of the fans and how they design it the mesh although it's metal isn't really meant to be a conductor here thermally instead it's just for are kind of encasing the fans which it's just surrounding a plastic hard shell of a wall anyway the cooler is a bit of a brick though it's heavy it's got seven heat pipes that run through a nickel plated copper cold plate it also has a toggle for performance or quiet modes in other words deep cool includes a resistor in line that can connect to both fans in quiet mode the resistor reduces the maximum power delivered to reduce the effect of RPM it's a physical switch to instantaneously toggle fan speed this is primarily useful if you wanted a more granular tune to the lower end of the pwm curve and you never plan to use the upper end the front of the cooler has a checkerboard pattern that deep coil also had on this one the ak-400 series and the 620 series the checkerboard doesn't do anything thermally at least not anything meaningful however the back is pretty interesting because the back of this cooler has a concavity where the finstack actually kind of comes into a central point at a slight angle this is actually a useful function because what they're doing here is creating a gap between the Hub of the fan and the back of the cooler for the rear pole fan where typically The Hub of the fan right behind it is a dead zone because there's a hub there and because the blades don't spin over that area there's not really any air movement so if it's smashed right up against something the fins immediately behind the Hub lose some of their efficacy getting that extra space like a millimeter or so can really help a lot in making sure there's air drawn over the fins or the part of the surface area for the heatsink of the cooler to actually get leveraged that covers the coolant Centric aspects of the Assassin 4 but deep cool has a number of attention to detail items that we also noticed and of course we have some criticisms as well one such positive attention to detail item is a small channel for cable routing for both of the included fans deep cool notched in a gap in the fins deck and in the plastic fan housing of the rear fan to make it easy to Nest the cable out of sight the cooler also has very clear markings to indicate the orientation for each bracket or fan and the included fan bracket was made in a way that it retains compatibility with non-deep cool fans unfortunately as we just talked about the middle fan doesn't share that compatibility if this fan ever dies you're going to be pretty Limited in what you can buy to replace it the central 140 mil fan uses an odd body shape to keep the vertical clearance and minimize the loss of surface area within the heatsink the downside of that is that there's not really anything available so we looked around and deep cool is not even selling this fan Standalone right now they have an older gamer store model that maybe would fit but overall you're pretty limited here and would have to go through RMA channels to get help our next biggest concern was a fan of wine this is something that Mike noticed when running some of our tests and we were unable to eliminate that wine even by moving the fan around vertically so here's a noise sample of that the 120 mil fan is easy to shift up and down to clear rear i o covers so we tried moving it around to eliminate the noise but it persisted the overall noise of the cooler in terms of volume is moderate it's on the high side when at 100 but overall it's loud enough that this wine gets kind of buried by other noises so it just depends on how loud the rest of your system is if your case isn't particularly quiet and you have other noises of the system like a lot of fans then you're less likely to notice but this is one of the main areas of improvement for deep cool it's also a really under appreciated area where noctua excels and we talked with one of Knocked was reps at computex in a really in-depth and cool engineering interview where they talk about how much time Knoxville as a company spends fine tuning specifically for weird acoustic profiles trying to eliminate annoying frequencies and try to generally flatten the frequency response so that you end up with a more tenable noise profile for a human because people people tend to not like whiny types of noises coming out of fans a lower hum is often easier to deal with so this is an area where deep coal can improve but we're knocked what starts to show some of its value that's not the basics of the cooler though we're going to look at the thermal performance Acoustics and pressure and flatness now and then we'll go over to Mike to talk about his concerns about fan compatibility centrally and some fancy tried as well as the overall mounting kit and what he thinks of the installation process our first thermal test is at 100 fan speed so we're allowing the coolers to run however loud they're going to run when maxed out we'll look at the noise normalized testing momentarily to establish a more directly comparable set of numbers but for now this is a battle when run all out fan RPM for the Assassin 4 will be listed as an average of all present fans from two to three which is important for you to know since they spin at different speeds we tested at 100 in a few configurations for the Assassin the first was stock and with the performance option on the RPM switch the second was with the Quiet option on the switch which is really just a lower RPM and the third and final was at a hundred percent on the performance switch with an additional 120 millimeter fan added to the front we used the ak-400 Deep cool fan from another cooler for this here's the chart the Assassin 4's default setting performance and two fans logged the result of 53 degrees Celsius above ambient that has it about tied with the thermal right Peerless assassin the noise level between these two is also functionally the same and mostly within error or variance the Assassin has a big vrm coolant Advantage but we'll come back to that you don't see that here for CPU thermals only the Peerless assassin is fiercely competitive and when we were digging around we recently learned that thermal ride became owned by a factory so that's a pretty big home field advantage if they can make their own coolers add in an extra fan to the Assassin improved thermals by 2 degrees which is significant and and outside of error that's a real benefit not necessarily worthwhile but it is real it's measurable noise also increased but only on the edge of being noticeable the quiet setting dropped RPM averaged between the two fans to 1287 and the noise level from 44 DBA to 37 and a half at the 20 inch distance in a noise floor of 26 DBA that's a big drop in noise levels the result was a two degree increase landing at between the quieter fuma 2 and other deep cool Solutions like the ak-620 and assassin 3. vram thermals are up now for this test we're pulling the same data set as the prior chart and using the same test conditions except we're measuring the thermal response of two mosfets under the CPU Cooler liquid coolers have their radiators mounted next to the vrams in a way that would be equivalent to a top mount in a case so they're comparable against each other but heavily advantaged against air coolers in the chart the Assassin 4 with 3 fans ended up running a 37 degree and 31 degree over ambient set of fat temperatures that's a slight Improvement in vrm1 over the dual fan setup although vrm2 is unchanged realistically they're about the same compared to the Peerless assassin though which is a different cooler the Assassin 4 is 7 degrees cooler when using the stock 2 fan setup in performance mode the main takeaway here is that these 140ml fans extend down below the fin stack and they do so deeper into the motherboard so they're able to get more air into the vrm heat sinks surrounding the socket seven degrees is a massive difference we also saw this on the Assassin 3 with its larger fans moving on to the noise normalized tests we really only need to look at one number performance and quiet no longer matters because we take control of the RPM the Assassin 4 ran at 56 degrees over ambient still leaving a 10 degree range up to the best liquid coolers but tying itself among the best for air coolers that's marginally better than the ak-620 and the Assassin 3 and it's about tied with the Peerless assassin ultimately for the quietest cooler capable of the most cooling you're still best off with a liquid cooler it's just not possible to achieve the same performance with so much less surface area and a less efficient transfer medium when you're considering Air versus liquid but there are obviously other caveats that make one preferable to the other but air coolers are often in the good enough category for their users this is one such example the biggest difference is that the soak time is longer on a liquid cooler so fan ramp is more gradual and less noticeable when using a well-defined curve which can make the liquid coolers preferable for people who want a more gradual fan ramp pressure testing is up next this evaluates the quality of the mounting system but not the flatness of the cooler this test allows us to examine how evenly the hardware distributes the pressure the testing is made possible with our pressure map scanner which we bought thanks to support from our patreon backers you can go to patreon.com Gamers Nexus to throw a few bucks our way to help us continue to self-fund our biggest testing and Investments without outside influence alternatively you can support us right here on YouTube by signing up with a membership the membership gives you things like extra emojis and icons for next to your name and our comments below and it also goes straight to us to help fund purchases for testing first with the 3950x we observe the central high pressure area of good contact in both scans the outer Corners had limited contact but since the die is in the center it ended up working well overall adding our 3800x scans to this image you can see a similar pattern on a different CPU the cooler applies high pressure centrally and the corner pressure you're seeing in all these scans is an artifact of the test setup in reality there's almost no contact there and the corner pressure represented here isn't the loaded pressure rather that's a natural course of the installation flatness is our final test in this testing we use a high Precision needle to measure depth from a Known Zero Point this is taken in microns of deviation and flatness a flatter surface isn't necessarily better but what is better is a lack of significant deviations that may indicate pitting or uneven leveling of the Surface by the machines here is the plot the Box indicates the median while the upper and lower points on the line indicate the extremities of the quartiles in the graph the Assassin 4 is one of the better coolers we've tested it's far more consistent than the Spirit 120 or the Amazon Basics coolers and overall we'd call this good time to check in with Mike to talk about the mechanical aspects of the cooler all right let's talk about fans first this cooler comes with two of them a 140 millimeter and a 120 millimeter we're going to talk about the 120 first I've got the 120 millimeter bracket and fans laid out here a few things to note you can swap a standard 120 into this bracket and I've gone ahead and done that here with a knock to a fan you'll notice that these uh the supports for the fan are flipped here and that's because the fan that it comes with is of course a reverse intake because of that something to be aware of if you put a standard 120 in there is this Cable Management that's going on here so noctua actually has a slot for you to put the cable in there but you're not going to want to put it in there because this bracket fits flush onto the back of the cooler so you're going to want to leave that cable kind of dangling through this little cutout for the 140 millimeter fan it's a it's a standard fan so this is not reverse intake meaning that the intake is on the kind of Hub side and then the exhaust is on the side with the supports however the dimensions the external dimensions of The Fan Hub itself are unique to this deep cool fan and that makes fitment of this bracket onto aftermarket fans kind of troublesome I wasn't able to find a fan in our stockpile that uh this bracket fit onto properly nor did I was able to find a fan that fit into the cooler properly and we'll show some b-roll of that here in a minute but of the fans we tested we tried a silent Wings four an NF a15 a noctua NFA 15 a knock to a nfp-14s Redux and I also just grabbed a knock to a fan off of a nhd-15 and I'll just kind of quickly illustrate that here but you can see it fits in One Direction and this noctool actually fits the best out of all of them but it doesn't go in all the way so you'll not be able to reinstall the top uh the top cover which we'll see here in the install segment nor will you be able to use the bracket effectively so something to be aware of the other thing about the fan that they ship with is I wasn't able to find a direct replacement online of the places that I looked so I checked out Newegg AliExpress and I even went to PC part picker which PC part picker kind of directed me towards a deep cool GF or gamer storm GF 140 millimeter fan that has the closest profile to this fan although it's not one to one so I'm not sure if it fits this Brack it and I'm not sure if it will fit flush into the cooler let's move on to the installation so I've got my board here I've already got the CPU installed and I went ahead and removed the stock mounting bracket that comes with am5 and I'm going to screw in these standoffs these brackets have some nice detail on them you can see they've got a CPU label with an arrow pointing towards the CPU to help you Orient the bracket correctly and then we'll secure it down with the nuts and I'm just going to Snug these down with the driver all right the brackets are on so we're ready for thermal paste I've also removed the rear fan just to make it a little easier to work with and we're going to place the cooler down on the CPU and line up our standoffs with the screws the captive screws that are on the cooler we'll get that started that's it the coolers installed you can tighten those screws down until they stop and it's a really secure fit just to illustrate how simple it is to put the rest of this cool together I'm going to snap the back fan on here and then we'll go ahead and do the 140. and this clicks into place with this metal bracket very nicely and our top cover which is magnetic and then for extra credit just to illustrate how easy this cooler is to work with we'll put on the extra fan with uh with the included bracket this fan is not included obviously but the bracket is and then this is also adjustable up and down for Ram clearance which is just it's a very nice touch okay for Intel the Assassin 4 comes with a metal back plate that came pre-assembled which was a nice touch so it saves some time and some frustration there the back plate is secured by these four screws slash standoffs and then we'll line up the brackets with the number two slot here for LGA 1700 and the rest of the Intel installation is identical to the am5 installation after this as far as critiques and criticisms go uh I had one thing I wanted to mention the fan screws that come with this cooler have a hex head on them um I wasn't too terribly fond of them the tool it comes with is kind of uh cumbersome and and awkward to use and I would have much preferred a Phillips head so much so in fact when I went to install this knock to a fan I went and grabbed some traditional Phillips screws to install that just to expedite the process a little bit but beyond the course hex head fan screws I was really impressed with this cooler overall it was a very easy to work with all the mounting hardware was intuitive and even everything down to the fan installation and adjustment was really easy to do so that wraps up the installation segment and I'm gonna throw it back to Steve the most favorable aspect of the deep pool assassin 4 is just its build quality and attention to detail those things unfortunately don't really help in the form of value it's more of the premium side of things where in other words you've exited the caring as much about cost and you've entered the smaller quality of life features that matter to you more and that's fine they're just two different types of buyers if you are seeking a value cooler this isn't it it's too expensive for that market and there are competitors that achieve the vast majority of this performance for far cheaper like the thermal right Peerless assassin but in a technical sense the Deep cool assassin 4 which shares half of a name with the Peerless assassin uh is at least the technical best on our charts in terms of the ease of installation and attention to detail things we like though they're excellent overall the cable channeling is good the markings on the fans and brackets are clear for the most part and even the inline resistor and switch offer some additional functionality if that's rare it allows you to get more use out of that low end of the pwm curve but at a hundred dollars it's expensive liquid cooling options can outperform this by several degrees Celsius and the like for like test something like the Arctic liquid freezer 2 280 or 240 series and that's especially true when you noise normalize these if you cringe at the idea of a liquid cooler though then again the Peerless assassin is a competitive alternative at a much lower price and if we want to throw even more variables in it you could get something like a cheaper 40 to 50 air cooler and then an ilm replacement kit like the thermal right one or the durbarrow one but that's kind of too expensive for this argument so you get a seven dollar ilm replacement it well the cheaper cooler the thermal benefit starts to evaporate on this much more expensive option uh and so you're pretty much left with the build quality and the quality of life stuff a deep cool has one other advantage and it's one that we're not sure the company even realizes it has and that's better vrm cooling we showed that in one of our charts if you're running a lower power vrm or that area of your case is particularly hot then maybe it's a bit of an advantage the biggest downsides other than value are just the fan wine and the 140 mil compatibility which we think deep cool can resolve with some fan tuning as the blades interact with the fin stack and the latter can be resolved by just selling that 140 ml fan separately now the fan wine we think for most people will get buried by the rest of the system noise and by boxing it into a case for those of you who are particularly noise sensitive then assuming it's not a one-off issue you're not going to like it but again we think the vast majority of people that includes people in our office would be just fine with it because we have so much other just kind of white noise around us from the machines anyway so our conclusion is fairly simple we do really like the build quality and the overall attention of detail they've done well there deep cool is starting to prove that it's not just a cheap device manufacturer anymore they're trying to show that they have the skill required to build something that's more expensive and not just be a gimmick it excels in vrm cooling for an air cooler so it's really competitive there and again it's a technical best in the thermal charge so we'd be happy to recommend buying it but only for users who aren't value Seekers this is not what you buy to get a budget built the Market's competitive right now and the way we see it is if you want a high-end air cooler and you don't want to go into liquid cooling territory the Assassin 4 should be on your short list we're starting to look at some other high-end air coolers as well all uh so check back for those if you want something cheaper the Peerless assassin and the spirit replacement I think it's called the Assassin X now those are good options for you uh and the noctow wins on the noise profile for sure but deep cool is winning on the thermal profile for our performance testing without going to liquid so that's it for this one thanks for watching it's a lot of fun as always to do cooler reviews check back for more you can subscribe for that or go to store.gamersexus.net to grab something like our solder mats mod mats shirts or other items to support our testing and help fund the work we do thanks for watching and we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 402,441

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, coolers, cpu coolers, best cpu coolers 2023, cpu air coolers, air vs liquid coolers, deep cool assassin iv review, deepcool assassin iv, deepcool assassin iv benchmarks

Id: ukYhjjoJnfc

Length: 24min 38sec (1478 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 21 2023