Conclusion
Today we looked at the performance of the DeepCool Castle 360EX A-RGB Cooler and stacked it up against various competitors that we’ve previously reviewed to see how it would perform with its 18 cores clocked to 4.7GHz dumping 500w of heat into it. We’ll recap the performance below and see how the DeepCool Castle 360EX A-RGB stood up to the heat in our kitchen!
Summary of Temperatures
From a temperature performance perspective, the DeepCool Castle 360EX made for an interesting curve. There was not much of a performance delta between the maximum fan speed level and 1500 RPM. Then when dropping to 1000 RPM, thermal performance did not change in a material way.
Of course, when reaching our maximum overclock which represented 500w of power going into the CPU, the DeepCool Castle 360EX was not able to keep its cool. Very few of the coolers that we’ve reviewed have been able to pull that off, so that’s not a mark against it in our book.
Summary of Sound Levels
The DeepCool Castle 360EX A-RGB was quiet, but not the quietest AIO cooler to cross our test bench. At full blast, it announced its cooling power at 50.4 dB(A) but quickly stepped down to inaudible as it sunk below 1000 RPM.
Overall, your ears won’t notice if you’re running the DeepCool Castle 360EX A-RGB at 1000-1500 RPM which gives it a great intersection between performance and sound levels.
Final Points
Looking at the charts, the DeepCool Castle 360EX A-RGB makes for an interesting case with how it performs. At its maximum fan speeds, it delivers rather middling performance compared to other 360mm AIO units. However, as the fan speeds drop, it excels compared to the coolers that we compared it to. This is the absolute opposite of the XPG LEVANTE 360’s performance that we recently looked at.
From a visual perspective, the 12 LED lights per 120mm fan certainly provide a light show, though, we’ve certainly seen more attractive bling from an A-RGB perspective. The DeepCool Castle 360EX A-RGB includes handy PWM and RGB splitter units that have adhesive to help you mount the splitters out of sight which is a touch that we haven’t seen from others.
With all this considered and that the DeepCool Castle 360EX A-RGB can be found online for $129.99, it provides a good package of cooling, a quiet sound profile, and respectable RGB bling. You’re not going to win any overclocking competitions with this unit, but for the price, it’s a great value and worthy of your hard-earned dollars.