DeepCool Ryzen Performance – Assassin III or Castle 360 AIO?

Performance

The performance of both of these coolers came as quite a surprise to me. they’re remarkably similar overall. What this tells me is that they’re both fully capable of unleashing our AMD Ryzen 3800X easily. One thing I did notice is that the air cooler has slightly lower idle temperatures at stock clocks. However, there was just 0.9c difference while using PBO (precision boost overdrive).

The load temperatures were about the same too, which I really did not expect. That being said, the liquid cooling was marginally better, offering 1.5c lower temperatures at full load vs air cooling.

The cooling acoustics wasn’t too dissimilar either. However, the air cooler uses two 140mm fans, and the liquid cooler uses three 120mm fans. So while they had similar acoustic levels, they had different acoustic qualities. The air cooler sounded deeper in frequency while the liquid cooler was higher pitched and subjectively felt a little louder at load, but it was slightly quieter at idle.

While running the 3DMark FireStrike test, we saw an impressive 20973 from the Castle 360. That’s a lead of 85 points on the 20888 from the Assassin III. The Castle RGB 360 won out again in Precision Boost Overdrive, scoring 15 points higher than the air cooler again. It’s not much, but faster is faster. Remember the GPU remained the same, so the lead only comes in the CPU bound aspects of the benchmark.

The same can be seen again in WPrime 1024. This is very much a CPU bound task and making gains here isn’t easy. However, the Castle 360 scored 0.2 seconds faster at stock, and 0.3 seconds faster in Precision Boost Overdrive.