Cooling

DeepCool LT520 AIO Liquid Cooler Review

Performance

Starting off with temperatures, the DeepCool LT520 might very well be one of the best AIO liquid coolers we’ve ever tested. And this is clearly a surprise given that this is not the highest specification 360mm LT720 design. This is a 240mm AIO cooler and, as you can see below, it managed to outperform pretty much everything else currently seen on our charts and by a clear margin too!

And this wasn’t even just at stock levels either. In our overclocking test, the highest result provided by the DeepCool LT520 was just 55C. This a figure we’ve seen produced by many cooling solutions under just stock conditions highlighting just how incredibly impressive this cooler is!

With that being said though, there is a bit of a chink in the armour and that’s when it comes to acoustics. At stock and overclocked idle levels, the DeepCool LT520 was incredibly quiet. It was, in fact, still fairly quiet when at 100% load under stock conditions. When overclocked and loaded, however, the DeepCool LT520 did get a little on the noisy side of things. And yes, this also happened during idle situations where the occasion load spike would see the fans notably increase in speed for just a second or two.

In this regard, we do, of course, and as per our methodology, use the fan speed/curve default predetermined within the standard BIOS settings. I do, however, think that the more experienced user will want to experiment with this and apply their own curve. In our testing, it seems that every time the CPU briefly spiked above 40C (as they often do), the fans would ramp up hugely in speed which, while only lasting for a couple of seconds, did make its use a little, for want of a better word, annoying.

Why does this happen though? Well, remember that these fans are rated to a maximum speed of 2,250RPM. This is a figure quite notably higher than usually seen with most CPU cooler fans which typically offer speeds of around 1,600, 1,800 or 2,000 RPM (with the first two being far more common).

I mean, let’s presume that a fan is set to run at 40% speed when the CPU is above 40C. On a 1,600 RPM fan, this is around 640 RPM. With these two DeepCool AK120s rated at 2,250, however, the figure is closer to 900 RPM! In other words, it’s nearly 50% faster based purely on the fact that these fans are, well… High performing!

So, the short version is, you’re going to want to dive into the BIOS and tweak the fan curve to keep these higher speeds down until the CPU gets, you know, actually hot. Sure, it’s great as it is, and low CPU temps should always be the priority, but I think even better overall results could be found with a little BIOS legwork in the fan curve settings.