DeepCool AS500 Air CPU Cooler Review

A Closer Look

Out of the box, the initial impression given by the DeepCool AS500 is that, for an air cooler that clearly indicates a fair bit of potential, it’s remarkably small. All going well, however, despite it’s relatively small stature, this should still provide to be a pretty potent performer.

Contact Plate

Featuring 5 heat pipes on each side of the contact plate, these should ensure good heat dissipation towards the radiator. With it all being color coordinated as well, it provides a really solid and shiny aesthetic. The contact plate itself is nice, large, and smooth. As such, this should provide good coverage whether you install this on an AMD or Intel based system.

Radiator

While the radiator doesn’t offer much in terms of aesthetics initially, there are certainly more than a few hints in the design as to what we can expect when that ARGB lighting is turned on.

In terms of the radiator itself, however, there is an excellent number of fins that are also well well spaced. In combination with a good fan (more on that shortly) this should, all going well, results in some nice temperatures.

A look at the top of the radiator gives us a better idea as to where the lighting comes from. Albeit, we should note that the sleek black covering provided to the center does an excellent job of covering the steel radiator and, in many views, improving the overall aesthetic potential when installed in a PC case.

The RGB lighting panels can be found either side of the black cover and while they don’t reveal much when turned off, they are at least white which contrasts well against the black.

In terms of width, even with the fan installed, there should be any issues here with RAM compatibility. The picture below perhaps best highlights just how small this air cooler actually is.

Fan

As an air cooler, DeepCool provides you with one 120mm fan. Albeit, they do provide you with fan attachments for a second if you wish. Being a TF140S design, the good news is that this has been specifically created by DeepCool and, as such, should work well with the cooling requirements needed here.

In terms of aesthetics, the fan carries a very unique fin design with open areas and patternation to the edges. While it certainly looks very pretty, we can assume that many aspects of this design are to provide both a good and strong air flow.

ARGB Lighting In Action

Once fitted to our system (and we will shortly be discussing the installation process) we found that while the ARGB lighting is limited to simply to top of the radiator, it actually looks really, really, good. It’s bright, bold, vivid and strikes a really great balance of probably keeping those who both love and hate RGB happy.

It is, of course, one thing to tell you how good it looks, but to help make things clearer, we took the brief video below that shows the ARGB lighting in action in a ‘real world’ environment. Having seen it myself, I think it’s hard to disagree that DeepCool has really knocked this aspect of the design out of the part!

Overall

Taking the individual aspects of the DeepCool AS500 as a whole, it seems pretty clear that this is both a well thought out and surprisingly attractive design. Admittedly, for many air coolers are potentially falling out of fashion, but with this design, it’s pretty clear that with a little focus in the right areas, they can definitely look attractive.

Looks are, however, only one aspect of this review. There is, of course, also the matter of how easy this is to install and, perhaps most importantly, how it performs in our testing. So, taking this logically, let’s find out just how good (or bad) it is to fit this to our test bench.