Valkyrie SYN360 AIO Cooler Review

Performance

Powered up, the vibrant LCD display looks amazing, and as the default settings show you all the temperatures, it’s practical too. However, it does support customisation so you can throw your favourite eTeknix logo on there too if you so desire.

Plus, the fans offer up some great colours from their corner ARGB highlights.

Temperatures

Right away, the Valkyrie delivered a great level of performance, with a load temperature of 69c, however, as we’ll get into in a moment, it managed to deliver 74c while limiting the fans to just 30% making it whisper quiet. Either way, both modes put it well in line with some impressive rival products.

Furthermore, when we loaded up our optimised settings, it crushed the competition with a staggering 63c! However, even when limiting this to 30% RPM we found virtually no change as the CPU is running faster, but at a lower voltage.

Acoustics

This has been updated since publishing, as our testing software was controlling the fans in an unexpected way. With the fans reaching such high RPM they were clocking in at 52 dBa, which is quite loud, but considering their RPM is typically much higher than most fans we test, that’s not all that surprising and reflected in the performance we saw in the separate fan review earlier this month. However, it’s also not that bad either. When we tested them on our motherboard silent profile, they actually operated at 36 dBa, which would make them some of the quietest fans, and this had little impact on the performance.

The overclocking profile did push the RPM up too, but no more than the stock clocks did which is great and again, lowering the fan RPM had minimal impact on the thermals so you could comfortably dial them back to be quiet.

CineBench R23

One bonus is that in our retesting, the Cinebench score did increase from 26575 at 30% PWM to 26943 points, which area very respectable scores for stock settings, and the best we’ve had from a 360mm radiator too.

The score didn’t push as high as I would have thought here, but again, it’s rubbing shoulders with some pretty fantastic, and largely more expensive rivals here, so it’s certainly nothing to complain about.