ASUS ROG RYUO III 240 ARGB White Review

Performance

The installation is straightforward enough since it’s an Akatek mounting kit, it’s a backplate, four standoff pegs and four thumbscrews. You can do the pump install with your fingers and it only takes a few minutes. Of course, you’ll still need a screwdriver to fit the radiator into your case, but again, that’s easy enough. Powered up, the RGB fans kick into life, and I like that they default to white too, matching the coolers aesthetic. The pump has the live Matrix display on it too, which looks so cool, but pictures just don’t do the colours justice, it’s very vibrant.

It defaults through an ASUS ROG logo animation, but you can load all kinds of presets, download more, or customise and animate it on a per-pixel level.

Temperatures

There’s no doubt about the cooling performance here, with the ASUS RYUO III 240 delivering the lowest temperatures we’ve had, at least on a stock CPU. Pushing up to our optimised settings say temperatures reach 74c, which is about average for our coolers so far. However, it’s impressive for a 240mm AIO, and especially considering the 12900K is a heat-generating monster.

Acoustics

It’s a little noisy on the default settings, by hitting 51 you’re going to know when it’s really being pushed. It’s dialled in for performance though, and dropping it down to a fixed RPM or a silent profile and you can easily get acoustics in the low 40s, even at full load.

Using my optimised settings, the already decent Cinebench score of 26382 was improved to 26700, but it did drop from 3rd to 4th place on the respective charts, but still a strong score regardless.

CineBench R23

Improvement

It’s not surprising that 240mm AIOs have a hard time with the i9, and this is seen by an increase in temperatures using our optimised settings. However, even at +5c, the max temperature is well below the threshold for any throttling issues, but for long-term stressing of the CPU, I’d certainly be looking at 360mm radiators.