Performance
The pump is super easy to install, with a backplate, four screw-in pegs, and four retention bolts to hold it in place. Clearly, Thermaltake has come a long way, as their AIOs used to be quite troublesome to install.
The pump has an infinity mirror effect on the outer ring when powered on, with a floating TT logo in the middle. This can be rotated, but I only realised that AFTER I uninstalled it; whoops! It does look great though!
Temperatures
So running the stock clocks on our i9-12900K, the TH420 delivered a very impressive 74C at load, that’s clearly competitive with the best coolers on the market. The Ryuo did score lower, but keep in mind, it was also quite loud too.
Using our optimised settings, which locks the cores 4.9 GHz on all P-Core and 4 GHz on all E-Core with a nice voltage of 1.3v, the i9 was absolutely loving the TH420, delivering our lowest load temperatures by far, and one of our lowest idle temperatures too!
Acoustics
Now, it was noticeably audible, running 53 dBa, which is on the louder side, but it’s more the noise of a lot of air being moved rather than an annoying fan or pump noises.
Overclocking made zero difference to the fan noise, but again, we did get our best-ever temperatures. I tinkered with the fan curves a little, and you can drop them down to about 30%, they’re practically silent and you still end up with the CPU peaking at around 70c, so it’s really about finding the balance you’re happy with, and you have plenty of headroom on this cooler to find it.
CineBench R23
The performance capabilities of this cooler are easy to see though, as it scored 25707 at stock, not bad. However…
Once we had it dialled in, it delivered our highest score in Cinebench yet, while simultaneously delivering the lowest temperature yet. That pretty much says it all then, it’s the best high-performance cooler we’ve ever tested!
Improvement
