Antec Neptune 240 AIO Liquid Cooler Review

A Closer Look

Out of the box, the Antec Neptune 240 is immediately quite eye-catching with its dark black coloring contrasted well against the silver highlights that can be found on both the radiator and the pump head.

The sleek style looks very professional and, even with the lights off, it ticks all the right boxes in terms of the aesthetics. Let us, therefore, take a closer look at some of the individual components in this design.

Contact Plate

The contact plate is fantastically large and the fact that this cooler is TR4 compatible is probably one of the main reasons for that. With pre-applied thermal paste as well, this is ready to go right out of the box. The only minor downside is that the protective covering did allow for some light contact with the thermal paste. As such, having your own tube (which isn’t supplied) might be a good idea just in case this happens during your ‘handling’ of the cooler.

Radiator

A closer look at the radiator finds that it is a surprisingly thin design, with the exception of the top area which is larger than usual. As we noted earlier in the review, however, this aspect of the radiator incorporates the water pump and has been specifically designed to remove any potential ‘vibration’ aspect away from the pump head.

With the logo etched into the side through the silver trim, it really does look excellent and, if you install this in your system, you’re going to want to try (as best as possible) to keep this aspect on show. It genuinely looks fantastic!

The most stand-out aspect of the radiator for me, however, is the visual aspect. It simply looks fantastic and Antec has really hit the ball out of the park in making what is usually the most boring aspect of an AIO’s design (usually just a black square) surprisingly nice to both look at and handle!

Pump Head

With the Antec Neptune 240 again carrying that silver and black styling to the pump head, this again looks excellent. Regardless of, we should add, whether the lights are on or off. With the pump not being a part of this design as well, it’s notably smaller than most other designs and, as such, should easily complement any system build.

Fan

As this is a 240 cooler, you are (at the risk of sounding obvious) provided with two 120mm cooling fans. While there are some nice little touches to the design (such as the angular corners) the real fun begins with these when you see the RGB lighting in action. More on that shortly.

As can be seen in the picture below, the only mild matter of curiosity is that when installed to the radiator, the fan blades seem to have a couple of centimeters worth of clearance which is, quite frankly, unusual but nothing to be overly concerned about. Particularly if Antec has found a method of making this design operate more efficiently.

As for the exact models, well, sadly Antec hasn’t provided us with any label suggesting what make these fans are (beyond the fact that the branding would suggest that these are Antec’s own design). The ‘exhaust’ side is, however, notable plainer and, as such, it’s not exactly going to take a genius to figure out which is the correct way around to install these.

Overall

As a complete assembled (but not yet installed) unit, the Antec Neptune 240 looks to be an excellent AIO. While there are a number of curiosities in the individual aspects, there is nothing that looks cheap or poorly designed and, as such, we have every confidence that this will translate into some excellent performance results in our tests.

Put simply, it’s sleek, stylish, and very nice to behold. With or without the RGB lighting. Speaking of RGB lighting, let’s take a look at that and see if its an apparent weak point in the armor!

RGB In Action!

Well, if you were curious as to what the RGB lighting looked like, all we can say is that it’s amazingly good! Starting with the pump head, the lighting is bright, bold and clearly excellently thought out in terms of the way the Antec logo is cut out into the cover.

The radiator fans again look fantastic with that really vivid lighting just jumping out at you. With this controllable either through your PCs ARGB settings or though the manual controller, they’ll undoubtedly be a color scheme to suit everyone here!