SilentiumPC Navis EVO ARGB 280 AIO Liquid Cooler Review

A Closer Look

Out of the box, the SilentiumPC Navis EVO ARGB 280 carries a nice solid aesthetic. The design is mostly black and, as you might expect, doesn’t really come to life until it is plugged in and blazing away.

In terms of overall first impressions, however, it all looks rather good. The unit feels solid and, of course, for a 280mm radiator design, it is larger and heavier than you might expect (or may have gotten used to in the past).

Radiator

The radiator (just in case you didn’t know what it meant in the name) is a 280mm design. In terms of aesthetics or anything of particular note, however, it largely stops there. Other than the size, the radiator seems fairly standard. In fact, the only exception we could see was that the pipes are a little closer together than you usually expect to see on an AIO. Does this do anything, though? Probably not. Albeit, it may make their positioning and movement a bit easier.

Pump Block

The pump block carries that distinctive style that would be referred to in the UK as a ‘threepenny’ style. By this, we mean that while it may look square, it actually isn’t. At least, not quite. The corners have been set to 45-degree angles which do, surprisingly, add rather significantly to the aesthetic. This does, in addition, also help with the installation, but we’ll get onto that later.

As you can see below, when the RGB is turned on the pump head looks pretty impressive with some nice, solid, but somehow not overkilled lighting effects.

In terms of designs, we really like how the pump head looks on the SilentiumPC Navis EVO ARGB 280. It is, incidentally, a design shared throughout the entire Navis EVO range and it speaks of their confidence if they’re willing to use it on 4 separate products!

Contact Plate

As this cooler carries compatibility with the Threadripper TR4 socket, you would naturally expect it to be rather large and a closer look clearly confirms that the contact plate is pretty huge. Albeit, despite the size, it does still look pretty tight for a TR4. Although we didn’t test it on a Threadripper system, it would’ve been curious to see exactly how well this covered the processor. I can’t help but feel that it would be a little tight…

Regardless of this, however, this is clearly going to provide excellent coverage for any of the (notably smaller – and far more common) socket designs of which this carries plentiful compatibility.

Fans

As this is a 280mm AIO liquid cooler it does, naturally, come supplied with 2 140mm fans. These fans are the SilentiumPC design ‘Stella HP’ models and feature the main focus of the ARGB lighting effects.

SilentiumPC makes a fairly big deal of these fans. Both in terms of performance and lighting effects and, in fairness, we have never found any cause to doubt any enthusiasm they may have. It will, of course, be interesting to see how they look, but also how they perform in terms of temperatures and noise levels.

Overall

When fully assembled, the SilentiumPC Navis EVO ARGB 280 has a reassuring strong feel to it. While it is a little bulky, it’s not more heavy than your standard 280mm AIO liquid cooler. In addition, thanks to the long and flexible pipes, it shouldn’t provide you with any installation problems (more on that shortly).

With the relatively thin (but still reassuring strong) cabling to the fans as well, it’s not overly difficult to get this installed in a manner that can minimize the effort required for cable management.

So, it looks good and has some nice solid aesthetics with the lights off. In addition, it also looks pretty nice and simply to live and work with. So how does it look when the light show begins? – Let’s find out!

RGB Effects

We’re going to be truthful enough to say that the RGB lighting effects, in reality, were nowhere near as bold on our test system as SilentiumPC present them to be in their images. Admittedly, our photos were taken in a real-world situation. There’s were probably taken in a studio. Even so, as you can clearly see below, they lack some of the punch that the advertising might lead you to think. Are we complaining though? Well, not really!

The RGB lighting effects are still nice, bright and vivid and thanks to the ARGB options, allow you to get these running nicely in conjunction with the rest of your system. You are, however, at a huge advantage with this cooler if you have an RGB sync compatible motherboard.

If you don’t have an RGB sync capable motherboard, the good news is that SilentiumPC has provided a manual controller. This is, however, somewhat limited. We found that using this manual controller only allowed you to connect the fans (which operate on a daisy-chain system) or the pump head. Not both. There are, of course, additional connectors that could solve this, but if you don’t have an RGB sync motherboard, this is something you will have to consider before purchasing.

So while it is nice that they do provide a manual controller, it isn’t perfect, and if we’re being brutally honest, feels more than a little cheap.