The Champ: $41 Thermalright Peerless Assassin CPU Cooler Review & Benchmarks

[Music] the market for dual Tower air coolers has really been shaken up in the last few years with a lot of really good options but nothing could prepare us for what for what thermal right claimed it's going to do which is unlock the chill Force and use hot paste and they're all out of hot paste before that this video is brought to you by thermaltake and the new series 500 TG argb mid tower case the thermaltake series case is perforated all on the front panel and the power supply shroud including perforations on the cable side of the case for further ventilation to the PSU and hard drive chamber of the case a separate access door for hard drives makes the case easy to work with for three and a half inch storage or the door can be swapped out for a separate LCD panel kit that displays system information other features include a GPU support kit vertical mounting and a hinged glass panel learn more at the link in the description below so today we're going to be looking at the 40 to 55 dollar thermal right Peerless assassin 120 this is a dual Tower cooler as you can see right there and this one depending on where you buy it which retailer and which model it is in the range of as I said 40 to 55 bucks there's a couple different versions there's the base model which is what we're working with today there's also also a white version which we have here it's the same thing except a different color and then there's an argb version which has argb big brain that's why you come here to learn stuff like argb means argb uh so we're looking at the base model for The Thermals but they're all going to be about the same for the most part these coolers are fairly affordable they're in that really packed dual Tower Market right now and the main competition for these is primarily for the things we've looked at recently anyway going to be the Deep cool ak-620 this did extremely well in our testing it was a good return to form for deep cool which the last time it was on our bench was pretty terrible showing for the company so they recovered really well with this or the ak-400 which is the single Tower cooler now thermal right also has a competitor to this that we already reviewed that's the thermal right assassin spirit and then finally in the sort of 50-ish dollar range there's the Scythe fuma 2 that also when we finally got around to reviewing this maybe two years ago or something like that it did really well on our bench so really cool and fun Market to a review right now and that's why we're going to look at the Peerless assassin today so we'll start with physical sizing for the cooler they have this really useful diagram on their website and this is accurate we double checked it against the actual cooler itself this is about one 10 millimeters in this direction but once you add a fan to it because one of them goes on the outside of the cooler that brings it up to about 135 the other direction here 125 mil and then height is 157. so for the average case most of the mid Towers on the market your max cooler height is in the range of 155 to 165 millimeters or so and with the Advent of the rtx40 series that has increased even further because now they have to fit cards that are huge but this is right in the range where if you have a cheaper mid Tower you're going to want to check for compatibility it's right up against the threshold there where we normally see it fitting for the hardware that's included this is some of what you get so they have mounting kits available for LGA 1700 and 4 and 5 and the main thing we actually care about here in all of our reviews is performance which we're going to get to so today we'll be looking at our standard cooler task bench and we'll be testing it in the heat loads up to 200 Watts so we use standardized heat loads with 68 watt about 125 or so and about 200. we'll also do pressure testing for this because this Hardware uh depending on what you mount it on whenever you have these points on the sides where it's a two-point Mount to a four point or four pole post you potentially end up with an almost off-cantor pressure map where the pressure is heavier on one side than the other or heavier on two sides in the instance of this design which can be a downside you need more paste to fill in those gaps and hopefully the gaps aren't too big so that's going to be something we're looking out for in the review once we get to the performance section I'll let Mike talk about the actual installation a little later in the video and his thoughts on the quality of the mount and the installation process he has a lot of opinions on uh how easy or difficult cools are coolers are to install but for the fans it's pretty standard clip design so they ship these you get four of them you mount the two fans they give you and if you wanted to for some reason put buy another one if you lose one or put a third fan on there everywhere online so standard fan Clips it just Clips to the front of the cooler just like that very typical now with relation to mounting this will best fit on like an am4 CPU am5 CPU you can throw it on Alder Lake you might need to buy a mounting kit for like nine bucks uh unless they just send one to you if you warranty it or something but anyway keep that in mind if you yours doesn't include all the kits you need but the interesting thing is the heat pipes here actually bias to one side so you notice that this pipe comes out farther this direction than the outermost pipe on this side the reasoning for this is just clearance so when you're mounting in this orientation in sort of a standard case layout uh it allows you to offset a little bit away from the top to give you some clearance at the top of the case for additional fans or something like that you probably don't need radiator clearance because you're using a cheaper air cooler so it's unlikely combination but otherwise you could I guess push it up that way but basically an intentional part of design to give some extra clearance a little bit of extra thought never hurts these things I mean it's attention to detail and uh when you're talking about cheaper coolers there's not really a ton of room to do unique things so that's one of the things they decided to do for the heat pipes it's a six pipe Design This has become very standard this price point and more heat pipes is not necessarily more better it doesn't really work that way but uh it can be at least an advantage it depends what they really need is maximum contact at the patch where the Silicon is most commonly located so what they're really going for is if you cram a bunch of heat pipes and make sure at least three or four of them out of these six have kind of direct coverage over the CPU and the IHS but for the rest of this these uh the fin stack it's an uncoated fin stack and you can see here I'll move out of the way a little bit that it's using these friction fit pins to hold a top plate on so this plate right here is just a metal top plate it's got four friction fit pins on each of the two caps and then those come down to about this depth and we'll get a shot of it with a light through it or something to hold the pins to get the fins together at the top of the cooler one of the things I noticed in the script was we said we think these are aluminum caps the rest of the fins are aluminum the bottom is just nickel plated copper the heat pipes are nickel plated copper but the Caps we weren't sure about this is really easy to test uh this is a magnet and aluminum is not magnetic neither is this top plate so it's it's aluminum I mean there are other non-magnetic Metals obviously but you kind of narrow it down to what makes sense here and it's aluminum the fans are a two-tone gray they use pwm for cables and the cables actually have some good attention to detail as well for a cheaper cooler where they're fully sleeved in black with black wires inside at least for this model of it there's also a black unsleeved y splitter that's included for the fans it's another nice touch for the user we don't normally talk about packaging or the unboxing the chill Force experience but we want to call attention to Thermal rights well fitting foam and good use of space in the Box the included accessory fit wedges between the towers of the coolers neatly and thermal right even avoided gross overuse of plastic bags with only three in the original packaging so good job to them there even if they're just trying to cut costs it works out well overall the fit and finish of the Peerless assassin 120 is good externally and it's better than we would expect from the average 40 45 dollar cooler but that expectation is changing more and more because going from 45 to 50 or 55 even though it's only five ten dollar gap which is kind of I mean it's like 10 of the price kind of a big jump uh but that jump of five to ten dollars gets you into a class of something like the fuma 2 which although now this is embattled on all sides as it's aged uh it still puts up really good performance for its price point at least assuming it's still on the 50 range I haven't checked today but uh that extra five dollars might change your expectation of fit and finish depending on what this costs when you see it online for the rest here the only negative thing we saw was when you look at it from the side there's a really slight slant and it's going to be kind of difficult to show but basically one of these towers is offset just a little bit farther than the other one it doesn't really matter it's the fact that we're pointing out something so minor says that overall the exterior of this cooler is well put together so to talk about the installation process I'm going to toss it over to Mike who has all the experience running this through tests and testing all the other coolers on the table here so we'll let Mike talk about installation all right so we are over in the CPU Cooler testing area and we are going to do an install we are going to be doing this on am4 today I've got my stuff laid out here already we're going to go ahead and do the install and then we'll talk about whatever uh critiques and criticisms we have about the cooler and its mechanical nature after I'm done with this so the first step is putting these four standoffs over the stock aim for back plate which I already have I kind of I taped it to the back of this motherboard for the demo but assuming you doing this in a case you know it would be held in place by the case so you put your standoffs into place and then we're going to place our brackets down and you can see thermorite went ahead and labeled these so it's pretty it's very clear what they're for they say M4 and then the Intel parts are also very well labeled ahead and lock these in next up is thermal paste get a little artistic with it oops Don't Judge Me normally normally I'm a spreader kind of guy but in a previous take I tried to spread this thermal paste which I don't normally use and it doesn't spread very well so today I'm an X and dots guy all right and then we're going to place the cooler down into position and we're going to make sure to line up these female ends these female nuts that are attached to the cooler itself with the male ends or the um that are attached to the bracket and remember we're gonna have to apply some downward pressure I like to put my hand on the other side to counteract the pressure I'm pushing or putting on the one side of the bracket or the one side of the cooler and I'm going to get that one started and then I'm going to maintain some pressure here and then I've got to push this one down and compress the captive spring in order to get this started and we're just gonna alternate left and right here and tighten the cooler down and that's tight and that is nice and secure next up of course would be to install the fans that's pretty standard we're not going to do that here it's just two fan clips and a standard 120 mil fan you put one in the center and then one on the front intake the Intel solution is very similar so we're not going to go over that today the only difference and thing I'd like to mention is the back plate they include is a metal black plate which is pretty nice this particular plate was before 12th gen was available so it's not 1700 capable but the plates they're shipping with now have uh have you know mounted solutions for 1700 as well as 11.50 the mounting solution here is really similar to a lot of the other coolers on the market and and that's a good thing the it's it's simple and it works but I'd say if I had any criticism it would be these captive Springs requiring so much pressure to get them threaded onto the brush bracket having to push down with a screwdriver towards my motherboard is just kind of a unnerving thing for me and I don't like how much pressure it required in order to get them to start the thread so that's probably my only criticism here beyond that everything else everything else works really well and has a nice fit and finish but that wraps up the installation segment so I'm going to throw it back to Steve okay thanks Mike I guess we're turning into Intel now thanks Steve let's commit to it thanks Mike now we're gonna get into the chart and talk about some of the thermals noise and everything else pressure tests are first this test uses chemically reactive film and a nist traceable scanner to show how even the mounting pressure is between the IHS and the cold plate this task was made possible by our patreon backers at patreon.com Gamers Nexus and purchases on store.gamersnexus.net the test on the 3950x produced one of the best pressure Maps we've seen yet with full coverage of the center and gaps only forming along the parameter paste will mostly help with that and versus the others the Arctic liquid freezer 2 does it better than this one but this is on the better side for air coolers 3800x maintains consistent Central pressure on the CPU but was generally more lacking at the borders and the second pass especially shows this with sort of a horseshoe pattern around the right Edge in all of the pressure tests we can also see an artifact of the mounting hardware trouble that Mike encountered during installation the left and right edges correspond to the top and bottom of the motherboard when socketed in a standard orientation and as you can see here they have heavy contact from having to hold the cooler in place while compressing the springs on the mounting posts now we work hard to avoid any further influence in testing data because we do this a lot and there's certain methods we can employ to make sure it doesn't impact the overall results however this points to a potential issue for the end user who isn't taking all those controls and mostly it's just the potential to have uneven thermal paste spread not the biggest deal but as long as you put enough paste on there you're fine if you're on the lower side though it may spread out evenly ideally thermal right would redesign this mounting mechanism so that the spring on the nut can meet with the post without requiring compression first noctua and EK have both managed as much flatness of the cold plate is next we use special tools to measure in microns from a calibrated zero point and it helps us show the pits and valleys within the cold plate design the Peerless assassin 120 is impressive here with one of the flattest results we've seen or at least on this truncated chart the flattest result we have on it it comes in just ahead of the Scythe fuma 2 for this one and it's far better than things like the Corsair A500 which is basically at this point just a really good tool for showing something poorly designed the Peerless assassin 120 has a very narrow range of results meaning average flatness is incredibly consistent and the deepest outlier measurement is shallower than most other coolers average range it doesn't get much better than this and we believe this has a direct correlation with the thermal results that are up next in this regard the flatness will help to make up for places where the cooler might otherwise be facing more of a fight like in just general size of the fin stack we'll kick off the thermal testing with our 198 watt high heat test similar to an overclocked AMD R9 CPU or a stock Intel I9 Ultra Lake CPU this first set of results is for 35 DBA noise normalized so all coolers have equal noise levels the Peerless assassin 120 came in at 56.4 degrees Celsius over ambient which ranks it tied for the top performing air coolers we've tested within error and indistinguishable from the 65 deep cool ak-620 that has a three and a half degrees cooler than the scytheville 2 at 66 dollars forming a significant lead versus an otherwise highly efficient cooler liquid coolers outperform the PLS assassin 120 especially the 107 Arctic liquid freezer 2 280 at three and a half degrees Celsius cooler it's a noticeable difference and the newer offset brackets would give you another one to two degrees on top of that with the liquid freezers but it's also over two times the price still you could run the liquid freezer too even quieter than the Peerless assassin while getting the same thermals so there's some benefit there depending on what type of user you are our next task shows all of the coolers with their fans at 100 speed this allows coolers with more powerful fans to brute force their way higher in the charge with the trade-off being higher noise levels the Peerless assassin 120 posted a CPU load temperature of 53.4 degrees Celsius over ambient and that's at 42.5 DBA that's a Three Degree improvement over the 35 DBA test this is again with an error of the top performing air coolers in our charts such as the Deep cool ak-620 so the cooler has a Headroom to ramp the fans for better cooling when necessary but with more noise this result even narrowly beats the massive and expensive noctua NHD 15 in thermals by 1.8 degrees Celsius and a noise by 1.6 DBA so it's reducing The Thermals and it's reducing the noise levels hitting two fronts against the D15 and highlighting that the Old Guard coolers need to step up their game to remain competitive there are other value adds and going with something like an OCTA cooler namely supporting accessories but the value is fading with each year you'd be better off spending that money on a liquid cooler Instead at this point our next set of tests is at a lower 123 watt heat load similar to an R7 likely future R5 CPUs and the 7000 series and similar to the Intel i5 CPUs today we're reducing the heat load now so more coolers are in contention here here's the chart for the 35 DBA noise normalized thermals the PLS assassin 120 charted at 54.1 degrees Celsius over ambient place it barely at the top of the list of coolers at least air coolers that we've tested the Arctic freezer 34 Esports Duo which is an air cooler tested within margin of error but cost roughly 12 dollars more going just below the pure assassin 120 in price the popular 35 veteran V5 came in at 8.4 degrees warmer that's a huge difference for six dollars and it'll affect things like CPU Precision boost for frequency that you get out of the CPU and finally for the 100 fan version of the 123 watt test the Peerless assassin 120 came in at 52.1 degrees Celsius over ambient at 42.3 DBA making the same comparisons as the last charge the Arctic freezer 34 Esports Duo tested 1.9 degrees warmer at roughly the same noise level and the Vectra V5 was 7 degrees warmer also at the same noise level bottom line then at forty dollars it's a pretty compelling value it's actually one of the strongest air coolers we've tested anytime recently in terms of value positioning and we're working on adding a lot more to the charts now that we've gotten away from the CPU and GPU Onslaught we can get back into coolers so it looks good in that regard as that price creeps up because we're checking and where this is out of stock like say on Amazon sometimes the price as it always does with third-party sellers skyrockets it'll jump to 55 it jumps to eighty dollars nine dollars do not buy this thing at 80 plus dollars it is a massive ripoff it's not throw right ripping you off there uh probably not even Amazon or Newegg it's likely a third party seller through those services but at 40 we think this is a good buy it makes sense for a simple air cooled setup where you don't want a lot of complications you want kind of a smaller Tower but something that can still pick up the coin required of say a 200 watt CPU so that's where it does well once you get into the 50 plus category there are some other coolers worth looking at but uh really the ones that would be the most competitive article is we still need to run through the bench so stay tuned for all that there's an even less expensive SE version of the cooler we haven't tested that one though so we can't confirm if it's identical to what we saw here but overall thermal rides strike in a great balance between price and performance just keep in mind there's other factors at play like warranty and support the only warranty information we were able to find was on the Amazon q a post by a company representative which claims customers in the US market can receive a refund within one year by messaging the seller on Amazon but there wasn't much other information so deepcool's all-out warranty for example is three years and realistically it's a giant piece of metal with the cheap fan as attached to it so the metal shouldn't go wrong and if the fan does it kind of sucks if it's out of warranty but it's also a very cheap fix so we won't rank that too hard also we haven't tested their warranty service maybe an idea for the future as a cooler though uh this thing it's pretty standard but it performs well and the price at 40 45 is pretty competitive so let us know what coolers you want to see tested against us in the future now that we're back to running a bunch of coolers through the bench and as always go to store.cammersaccess.net or patreon.com Gamers and access to support us directly and thanks for watching check out our coolers playlist for more we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 325,612

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, cpu coolers, cpu cooler reviews, cpu cooler benchmarks, thermalright peerless assassin 120, thermalright peerless assassin review, thermalright peerless assassin benchmarks, best cpu coolers 2023, best air coolers 2023

Id: Mm4hyIHe1PM

Length: 22min 43sec (1363 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 12 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/plkyz]

They recently came out with a 7 heat pipe version called the phantom spirit which should perform even better than this! I would have picked the phantom spirit if I didn't already have an ak620 but I'm still happy with mine.

[u/PotentialAstronaut39]

Incredible price for that performance.

You used to have to pay more than double that price for that performance.

If the performance delta of the 5$ cheaper SE version isn't big, it could become the next "Hyper 212".

[u/LeftysRule22]

Thermalright is killing it right now, the Assassin king with 5 heat pipes goes as low as $22. Their 120mm pwm fans with or without rgb are killer value and perform great. 3 pack daisychain-able argb fans for $14...how?

[u/bubblesort33]

$38.90 Canadian right now on amazon.ca, which seems absurd. Someone over there is being severely underpaid if they can build this for that cheap. It's what I was initially planning to cooler my 7700x with, if my Aliexpress waterblock build would not have worked out.

This thing is more quiet and cooler than a Noctua NH-D15? What?

[u/Gnerma]

I was going to buy one of these in a few weeks for my new build now they're going to be sold out. Thanks Steve.

[u/kris33]

Thermalright are also the guys behind the contact plate fix everyone with a 13900k should get:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYU1OskbY-Q

[u/Hakairoku]

Hot fucking damn, it's even giving liquid coolers a run for their money. Holy shit

[u/DJ_Marxman]

Considering the price and performance here, it kinda feels like Steve is underselling how amazing this thing is. It's half the price of its nearest competition.

I guess I don't expect more out of GN, they never heap praise on anything.

[u/bizude]

The Peerless Assassin is probably my favorite air cooler at the moment, when I tested it with my 12900K it kicked ass.