Cooling

InWin BR36 AIO Liquid CPU Cooler Review

Performance

In terms of temperature control, the InWin BR36 is immediately impressive as it provides us with some of the lowest gaming and idle scores we have encountered to date. Admittedly, the number creeps up a little when we push things to their limits. Still, given that CPU temperature control is (arguably) the most important aspect of a coolers job, the BR36 does it fantastically.

In terms of acoustics, however, we hit a pretty significant snag. Quiet, this ain’t! – Under the default BIOS setting, and when under significant load, the fans seemed to want to spin up to something around 2,000RPM consistently. In fact, this went so high that we even wanted to see how far they would go, and our figures reported something close to 3,000 at one point. With such speed, there is inevitably a fair bit of noise.

Now, in regards to acoustics, is the InWin BR36 obnoxiously loud? No. It’s just a lot noisier than we’re used to seeing from AIO coolers and remember, when we review AIO coolers, we’re usually only interested in seeing models we think will interest you and impress us.

So the short version is, there’s a definite trade-off to be made here in the BIOS settings between the amazingly low temperatures it provided us with the rather irksome levels of noise this created. That being said, though, with this cooler being TR4 ready out of the box, part of me has to wonder whether the standard configuration has been designed with that in mind. That is, after all, quite a toasty processor and needs a fair bit of grunt to keep it, even relatively speaking, cool.

As a huge plus side though, if you love yourself a bit of high-end overclocking, or perhaps don’t care too much about your overall systems noise levels, this cooler seems to be definitely right up your street if you just want your CPU to be as cool as possible. And let’s face it, that is the most important thing here.