ID-Cooling SE-914-XT ARGB CPU Cooler Review

A Closer Look

Out of the box, the ID-Cooling SE-914-XT ARGB presents itself exceptionally well. With it’s sleek black design with white highlights (and of the latter, these are where the ARGB magic happens) it certainly gets things off to an excellent start.

The fan provides excellent coverage for the radiator and following through with the general coloring scheme, it definitely looks like it was designed for this cooler. Something clearly indicative in the fact that this fan is only a 92mm design.

Unlike many traditional CPU air coolers, the ID-Cooling SE-914-XT ARGB is surprisingly slim and, as such, RAM compatibility should throw up no issues here regardless of which way around you install this. Or, indeed, should you plan at a later date to install a second fan. As you may have noted in the accessories, ID-Cooling does provide you with the clips should you choose to do this.

So, the initial impressions are good, but what about the individual aspects of this design that make up the whole? Well, let’s take a closer look!

Contact Plate

The ID-Cooling SE-914-XT ARGB has 4 head pipes that lead away from the contact plate on each side. Coming with a black coating, these blend in well with the coolers overall aesthetic giving it a nice visual appearance.

The contact plate itself is nice and large and, as such, whether fitting this to an Intel or AMD system, coverage should be excellent. In addition, leaving the copper areas exposed should, at least in theory, result in some excellent heat dissipation.

Radiator

Despite being notably thin, the radiator looks absolutely fantastic with it’s sleek black design and, despite the small size, actually feels pretty substantial to hold in the hand.

A reason for the weight is likely due to the design in which ID-Cooling has interlaced various aspects of the radiators fins. With more surface area available, this should allow for heat to be better distributed throughout the tower, which, by proxy, should result in some solid temperature control performance.

As we noted above, the radiator is remarkably thin and thanks to the design of the contact plate mounting bracket, RAM compatibility even with the fan installed, should be near perfect!

The top of the radiator has a plastic housing that clearly hints towards where some of the ARGB lighting effects will pop. Even with the lights-off, however, this is still an exceptionally strong and visually pleasing design that we daresay many consumers would find highly-attractive.

Fan

Although ID-Cooling does give you the option to install a second fan, we should note that the SE-914-XT ARGB is only supplied with one out of the box. With the coloring matching the theme of the cooler as a whole, however, the model picked here has clearly been chosen wisely.

A look at the manufacturing mark strong suggests that this has has been both created and manufactured by ID-Cooling. This is generally good news as it likely means that it’s speed and acoustic performance has been specifically tied into the overall design.

Overall

So, both in terms of the overall aesthetic and the individual components, the ID-Cooling SE-914-XT ARGB certainly looks to be a very decent proposition. While we will look into the RGB and test results shortly, however, there is the small matter of confirming just how easy their ‘easy installation’ method is. So, let’s get this fitted to our test bench and find out!