With Alder Lake's cooling demands in mind, I'll be rating CPU Coolers in 3 different tiers. The case you use will also influence cooling results.

A system's motherboard can especially influence this, as there are boards on the market with CPU sockets that aren't up to Intel's spec, which can cause warping or poor contact with the CPU.

Please note there are many factors other than the CPU cooler that can influence your cooling performance. Many coolers, including DeepCool’s last generation Castle EX AIOs, failed to keep the i9-12900K under TJ max when power limits are removed in workloads like Cinebench and OCCT when I’ve tested them. This means that coolers that kept previous generation products like the i9-10900K nice and cool sometimes struggle to keep Intel's i9-12900K under TJ max–the top temperature before the CPU starts to throttle.

Due to the increased thermal density of the Intel 7 manufacturing process, as well as changes to core and component layouts, Alder Lake CPUs are more difficult to cool than previous generation CPUs in the most heat-intensive of workloads. As with other recent AIOs, I'll be testing DeepCool’s LS320 with Intel's Core i9-12900K.

360 total security review maximum pc