ASUS ROG RYUO III 240 ARGB White Review

How Much Does it Cost?

ASUS ROG Ryuo III 240 White Performance AIO CPU Liquid Cooler is available now, with an MSRP of £249.99.

• £243.39 @ Amazon.co.uk
• £249.95 @ Overclockers UK
• £249.98 @ Scan Computers

Overview

This is a pretty fantastic cooler, and while it’s not quite the coolest performance we’ve seen yet, it’s certainly respectable in the realm of high-end performance, which is always impressive for a smaller 240mm radiator design. We use a particularly fierce i9-12900K for our testing, so to put in a competitive Cinebench R23 score is impressive. Anyone trying to cool a high TDP CPU will do just fine if they’re just gaming with this cooler. However, more demanding and extended rendering workloads and similar heavy-duty CPU tasks would benefit from the 360mm version.

It’s a little noisy too, the fans move a truly tremendous amount of air so while the fans themselves aren’t really audible, the sheer force of air they can move certainly is. There’s no reason why you can’t dial back the fans a bit, and from my own personal testing, you can go a lot quieter before you see the cooling performance change even a little bit. The pump is silent, can’t say I ever heard so much as a whirr or a gurgle from it.

The AniMe Matrix Display is epic, but let’s be clear, you can get a good quality cooler that will cool just as well as this one. Take that lovely Antec Vortex 360mm AIO, it’s £99. That’s a £150 price gap, that’s frankly hard to ignore. So let’s get this straight, you’re paying about half of the £250 retail price of this cooler for that trick pixel display. It is worth it? Well, that’s subjective, but is it really awesome and does it look really amazing, and can you do some really cool things with it? Yes, yes and yes.

Should I Buy One?

This is one of the nicest looking AIOs on the market today, with an innovative pump design that has diamond-cut aluminium textures, a trippy AniMe Matrix Display, and chrome fittings. Yes, you’re paying a big premium for these luxurious features that do nothing to improve the admittedly very good cooling performance, but if you need to keep your CPU cool and keep your PC looking better than the one your friends have, this will get the job done, just bring a lot of money to the party.