DeepCool AK400 WH Performance CPU Cooler Review

Installation

Starting off with the product manual, while lacking in any kind of written instructions (and honestly being a little cheap in terms of overall quality), the information provided within from the masses of diagrams is certainly useful and, as long as you’re paying attention, should be more than adequate to help you get your CPU cooler fitted without too much difficulty.

Admittedly though, the process itself isn’t perfect and this is perhaps best highlighted in the image below. In it, we’ve shown two of the spacers that distinguish socket 115X from 1700. Visually, at a glance, they look almost identical and within the instruction manual, the distinction in different shapes is barely presented. – Even worse, although the socket type is stamped onto the spacers, it’s so small that you can hardly read it. I’m not even joking, I had to go and get my reading glasses (which I have to wear maybe for a whole one minute a week on average – highlighting that my eyes are old, but not bad) just to be sure I was getting the right ones.

Put simply though, I can easily see people getting this key component muddled up, or, at the very least (and like me) have to needlessly spend a few minutes just making sure the right ones get used.

Fortunately, if the manual isn’t helping you much, DeepCool has created an installation video that, quite honestly, is pretty decent at highlighting the step-by-step aspects and is a solid piece of additional information should you be struggling.

Mounting

Aside from some issues regarding the identification of small parts, the DeepCool AK400 WH still has a pretty straightforward installation methodology that shouldn’t prove to be a challenge to new or experienced hands. – Perhaps surprisingly, it differs quite notably from the larger AK620 variant and we only point this out because it’s unusual to see different methodologies from within the same series of coolers.

We were able to get the DeepCool AK400 WH installed without any notable incident and in terms of air cooler design and installation methodologies, this is about as easy as it gets.

Overall Thoughts

From out of the box and onto our test bench, the DeepCool AK400 WH only took us around 10-minutes to install. Admittedly, this would’ve been significantly less had the written instructions been a little more detailed to prevent the confusion about identifying the correct spacers for our socket type. – On the whole, though, it’s a nice and simple design, and, with it fitted, it’s time to see how this cooler performs in our testing!