ASUS ROG RYUO III 360 ARGB AIO Cooler Review

How Much Does it Cost?

The ASUS ROG Ryuo III 360 all-in-one liquid CPU cooler with Asetek 8th gen pump solution, Anime Matrix LED Display and ROG ARGB cooling fans are available now from Amazon in either black or white for £299.99. That’s obviously a lot, and arguably, you could get a great performing cooler for half that price, but this isn’t just about cooling performance, and ASUS has really pushed the overall build quality and aesthetics to the next level here. If that sounds like something you like, then the price is the price, but as much as I love this cooler, I’m not sure I’d pay that much for a cooler for my own rig, then again I don’t even have a window of my case these days.

Overview

ASUS has really gone above and beyond with their latest CPU cooler, and while I personally wouldn’t feel comfortable spending this amount of money on a cooler, I can’t really fault it in any way… because some said and some unsaid, it does everything it promised to do. It promised to be a marvel of ARGB lighting and to wow with its matrix LED display, and well, it most certainly does that and it looks amazing. I never look in the side of my PC, so the display on the pump and all that ARGB is not my thing, but if you want to look into your computer and marvel at the sexy hardware, this cooler is AAA stuff.

It was surprisingly easy to install, as you may know, Mike did the cooling reviews for a couple of years and I only recently took them back on, so having to deal with AIOs again was an expected struggle, but there have certainly been improvements. Cables can be a pain, given there are two from the pump, and six fan cables when you include the RGB stuff, and then the splitter cables. How people get that looking neat behind the motherboard, I’ll never know, but thank god for cable management cut-outs!

It’s extremely quiet, which startled me, as the flagship ASUS coolers used to use Noctua fans, but switching to their own design has clearly worked well enough, as the noise levels were consistently quiet throughout all testing.

Then there’s the cooling performance, I mean, you expect a flagship 360mm AIO to be pretty good. However, it’s the price that made me think “This thing better be a total weapon of a cooler or I’m going to point at it and laugh” but well, I’m eating my own words, as it’s just a fantastic cooler. Price goes right out the window for the enthusiast users, if it cools the best and looks awesome, they’ll buy it. That’s all there is to it really, if you don’t mind spending £300 on an AIO, buy this one, it’s pretty fantastic.