8 Cpus Adalah
Is liquid cooling quieter than air cooling?
Generally, an all-in-one liquid CPU cooler will be quieter than an air cooler mounted directly on the processor. That's because the fans attached to the cooling radiator are generally larger and can therefore spin slower than an air cooler. The water pump is often well insulated, but there can be some noise from this part.
But there are large air coolers with big heatsinks and large fans that can compete well with the noise generation of an AIO liquid cooler. The Noctua NH-D15, for example, has two 140mm fans and is very quiet in operation. The quietest of all would be an entirely passive cooler with no moving parts whatsoever. However, those can't always cope with the hottest and most heavy CPUs.
Modern CPUs are all so good that we're the winner here, not the hardware. No matter what budget you have, you'll easily find a processor that will suit you just fine. It's the same if you want something just for gaming, a chip that's more versatile, or if you need a CPU to power through any content creation task.
That said, we're still waiting for the perfect processor. Some might be incredible for gaming but suck up mountains of power, where others only work great with the very latest operating systems or need additional software to reach its full potential.
There were three new releases this year that genuinely made us think that they were as close to being perfect as you can get right now. Three CPUs that are simply brilliant at what they do. Three chips that we'd recommend anyone should buy, because we know you won't be disappointed.
There can only be one winner of our coveted PC Gamer Hardware Award for best gaming CPU in 2023, though, but which one of the three do you think it will be? Check out the nominees below and see which takes the crown when we announce the winner on New Year's Eve.
Arctic Liquid Freezer III 280 A-RGB
The best liquid cooler
Socket support: Intel LGA1851, LGA1700, and AMD AM5 and AM4
Scale: 280 mm (240, 360, 420 available)
Full radiator dimensions: 317 x 138 x 38 mm
Fan speeds: 200-1,900 RPM
Noise level: None claimed
Additional fan for VRMs
Fans are preinstalled
Contact frame for better Intel cooling
Thick radiator won't fit in some PC cases
Limited Intel sockets supported
✅ If you want to keep the VRMs cool too: The fan in the CPU block works to keep your non-core components cool, too.
❌ If you have a compact case: The extra thick radiator is great for cooling but is a bit tougher to fit in small cases.
The best liquid cooler has to be the Arctic Liquid Freezer III. It's simple, straightforward and does a stupendous job of keeping a CPU nice and chilly.
The Freezer III retains the affordable price tag of its popular predecessor, the Freezer II, and keeps the tiny fan on the tip of the pump to keep your VRM cool. That might seem silly, or a gimmick, but effective VRM cooling is an underrated feature that we don't see too much of these days.
The Freezer III works across both Intel and AMD CPUs, though it only supports newer Intel sockets, effectively 12th Gen chips or later. It uses a proprietary mounting system that requires you to remove the original ILM and fit the new bracket included with the cooler on. It sounds complicated but it isn't. That said, it can be a bit fiddly.
Once it's loaded onto your chip, it provides excellent cooling capability. The 280 mm version tops the competition and without generating an absurd amount of noise. That's thanks to the 140 mm fans included here, two of Arctic's P14 140 mm. That's a big plus point for a more affordable liquid cooler—some of which have loud pump whine to make up for a performance deficit.
The addressable RGB LEDs included on both fan and radiator are adjusted via the motherboard UEFI or third-party software—there's no Arctic software provided to deal with them, though that might be a blessing for some software sick gamers. I'm pretty tired of having five different apps controlling various components inside my PC. This cooler makes for one less.
With all that and an affordable price tag, there's no topping the Arctic Liquid Freezer III.
How do I choose the CPU cooler that's right for me?
If you aren't sure whether you need an air cooler or a liquid cooler, it comes down to budget and compatibility. The first thing to check is whether a cooler supports the socket on your motherboard and offers a sufficient mounting solution. Most coolers today are compatible with AMD's AM4 socket and Intel's latest LGA 1700 socket and should include the prerequisite parts to install them inside the box. However, some older coolers, perhaps second-hand ones, may not support the latest chips.
The other thing to consider is whether a cooler is sufficient for your CPU. Your CPU wastes a certain amount of energy as heat, and that needs to be dissipated effectively. A cooler does that, but some high-end processors require better cooling to keep temperatures low. Coolers often come with TDP ratings denoting what TDP of CPU they can sufficiently chill, but it's not always this straightforward. Some CPUs require larger contact points for adequate cooling, such as AMD's Threadripper chips, while Intel's 12th Gen CPUs often hit power draw much higher than their stated TDP.
Just be careful to check out what sort of chip a CPU cooler is rated to cool, especially if you're planning on overclocking.
Those on tight budgets now don't necessarily need to consider an aftermarket air cooler. Until AMD released its Wraith coolers (and then took them away again), we'd never recommend a stock cooler to any PC gamer, but they're a good stand-in when money is tight. Still, it's best to replace these with something beefier eventually, and if you have a little more spending room, liquid coolers can offer a lot more—from advanced RGB lighting to intelligent software control.
Some of you may be wary about putting liquid near your expensive components, but rest assured all of the coolers recommended in this guide are backed with excellent warranties that will cover you in the event of a manufacturer failure—a colossal leakage is an infrequent occurrence, anyways.
How do you test CPU coolers?
Like most components, choosing the right CPU cooler depends on several variables, including performance requirements, case compatibility, budget restrictions, and aesthetics. We test performance using Prime95 and a mixture of modern PC games for extensive stress testing to find the best CPU coolers. Our top selections were based on thermal performance, noise, value, and overall feature sets.
Best high-end liquid cooler
Overview: Best CPUs for 2023
Welcome back to our “Best of” roundup series. We do these at the end of every year, and there's a lot to catch up on. To set the expectation for this particular piece, and all the other “Best ofs” you'll see coming up, this is intended to get people up to speed as quickly as possible.
We have run thousands of tests over the past year. Actually, if you count the individual test passes, we're in the many tens of thousands at this point. We've looked at dozens of parts, and it's hard for us to keep track of – we have to constantly reference the data. The purpose of these pieces is to both refresh ourselves on the data, and to get everybody who's been out of the market for a couple of years back up to speed quickly – or even if you followed it closely, just a reminder. A lot of people will build their system, check out for a few years, come back in, and wonder "what happened." So that's what this is intended to help with: to resituate you.
If you want the individual in-depth reviews for any of the components we're talking about today, you can find some of those as articles here on the site, or definitely in video form on the GamersNexus YouTube channel. We will be including some charts to reinforce a couple of key points that we think are important, even if you're maybe not as much of an enthusiast user, but if you want all of the charts, you can go back and check through the individual reviews. We'll also have links to the processors on Amazon or Newegg. The point here is to give a flyover and help you come to some conclusions quickly.
Original review | Newegg | Amazon
The first award category is for Best Overall CPU of 2023. This one goes handily to the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D CPU, which has had price reductions down to around $360. This CPU is a double-winner, also taking our Best Gaming CPU category later -- so for Best Overall, we’ll focus mostly on the non-gaming aspects of the 7800X3D.
The 7800X3D is priced right around where high-end gaming CPUs long held pricing in the pre-i9 and R9 days, bringing chart-leading framerate back to a more normal price-point for a high-end machine. They’re also single CCD solutions with only one size of core. This makes scheduling easier and simplifies setup as opposed to something like a dual-CCD 7950X3D or, in Intel’s case, a P-core/E-core design. The 7800X3D isn’t a leader in production benchmarks like Blender, but it’s more than acceptable while still leading in gaming. There’s a balanced category for CPUs that sit in the middle better. It does do excellently in Photoshop though, so the X3D CPUs can punch up depending on workload.
Another non-gaming contributing factor is the efficiency: The 7800X3D is an extremely efficient part and ranked behind the new Threadripper parts that blew the doors open in this category. Because of the efficiency, it’s relatively easy to tame thermally: You don’t need a 360mm CLC to cool the 7800X3D, reducing cost barrier to entry and opening up cooler options.
The 7800X3D particularly stands-out for anyone trying to max-out the framerate in gaming with a 7900 XTX or RTX 4090, where you want to minimize bottlenecks as much as possible. We’ll come back to that in the gaming category.
Original Review | Amazon (13600K) | Newegg (13600K)
The next category is for the Most Balanced CPU -- we've had this category for several years now, though skipped last year due to having other options. This one goes to the i5 K-SKU CPUs: The 13600K or 14600K, depending on whichever is cheaper because they’re basically the same.
The Most Balanced category is specifically a weighting of all tests we run for GN reviews, but also considering price. This means we’re factoring-in the $270 price of a 13600K right now, for example, which makes it extremely competitive from a pricing standpoint. Even though the name is a generation old, the CPU isn’t -- it’s perfectly good as a new chip that is balanced between price, gaming performance, and production performance.
As an example, we found the 14600K scored 747 points in our aggregate Adobe Premiere benchmarks, putting it ahead of the 7800X3D and about tied with the 7700X. The CPU was likewise particularly competitive in our Blender rendering benchmark, where the pair completed in less time than the 7700X and 7800X3D. The 13700K and 14700K also do well here, with an overall strong balance across all tested applications despite not being the “best” in any of them, but the 13700K and 14700K didn’t win this category due to the high power consumption and price.
The gaming performance is also strong for the price, with our pre-patch Starfield numbers -- which were run with all of these on the same version -- at 111-112FPS AVG for the i5 CPUs. That’s behind the 7800X3D, but with the higher production workload performance in many cases and the lower price, it’s balanced.
Baldur’s Gate 3 performance is also good, putting the i5 CPUs alongside the powerful 5800X3D. The 5800X3D got a different award, but doesn’t get our balanced award primarily due to weaker production performance.
While the i5 K-SKUs are not the best in any single category, they fulfill an overall well-rounded performance and value profile.
Next up is the award for Best Gaming CPU. This one goes to the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D. The category is as basic as it can be: This considers only the absolute, highest-performing CPU in games we’ve tested. That means we’re looking at CPUs for FPS snobs. While there are other options that’ll get you 80% of the performance, those aren’t considered here. That makes this one heavily numbers-based.
First, the basics for anyone who’s been out of the market: The R7 7800X3D is a socket AM5 CPU that uses AMD’s stackable cache, or V-cache, which we’ve found to have a large impact on gaming performance. It’s an 8C/16T part with 96MB of L3 cache that is currently around $360 at the time of filming, with occasional small discounts on Newegg and Amazon. This one has been hovering at this price for a while now, down from its $450 launch MSRP.
Because this is a purely numbers-based category, let’s look at some recent gaming benchmark charts:
In the new Cyberpunk: Phantom Liberty expansion that probably a lot of you will be playing during the holidays, the 7800X3D led the charts. It was about tied with the 7950X3D, although it carried better 0.1% lows. We have run the 7950X3D through this game several times and found that it always encounters a couple sluggish frametimes run-to-run despite an overall good average, which we think just has to do with scheduling. Either way though, the 7800X3D is meaningfully ahead of everything here and isn’t even the most expensive gaming CPU on the chart. The 5800X3D would get you most of the way there as an upgrade, but Intel’s 14900K leaves a large gap to the 7800X3D.
In Stellaris turn time simulation, the 7800X3D was roughly tied with the rest of the chart leaders. It’s up there with the 14700K, 14900K, and 7950X3D, which are all roughly within error of each other.
Baldur’s Gate 3 had the 7950X3D ahead on a technicality, but it was ultimately very close to margin of error. The 7800X3D and 7950X3D both establish a relatively wide gap between themselves and the next CPU, the 14900K. “Relatively” is the important word: It’s not meaningful, but if you glance at the rest of the chart, you’ll notice much more gradual scaling of the average bar down the chart. If you were to look at the 1440p chart, you’ll see that the 7800X3D is still at the top and retains all of its performance, despite an increase in GPU load.
Finally, we’ll show Starfield as a counter-example. This was before the most recent patches, so new numbers will be a little higher, but all of these were run on the same game version and so are directly comparable to each other. Intel kept a lead here, with the 14900K ahead of the 7800X3D by 15%. It’s not always the best, but it’s the best often enough that it’s our go-to for a high-end gaming machine.
The 7800X3D is the overall best gaming CPU. There are places where the cache doesn’t get leveraged as heavily, but the places it’s beneficial outweigh the areas we saw diminishing returns. Although the extra cache doesn’t benefit this CPU in most of our production workloads, the core count allows it to remain a good overall option. If you’re editing videos or running file compression and decompression workloads, the CPU does perfectly fine. This will most likely bottleneck you on the GPU, so to fully leverage this CPU, consider a higher end GPU. We’d be looking in the RTX 4070 Ti or RX 7900 XT and up categories especially, although you could obviously pair anything with it. We recently revisited the RX 7900 XT right here on the website if you want to see how that is today.
Original Review | Amazon | Newegg
Next up is for the best upgrade. We added this category last year. We’re defining this as the best CPU that can drop-in to a board of a past generation, either Intel or AMD. It’s probably no surprise that the winner is the R7 5800X3D, and we hope that this encourages both AMD and Intel to keep offering good upgrade options in the future -- it’s great for consumers and often highly cost effective for a stricter budget.
Our recent Ryzen 2000 revisit showed just how much room there still is to bring AM4 forward, especially in gaming. The best part is that a lot of boards from the prior Ryzen generations can support the X3D CPU already (just check the CPU support list and update BIOS before pulling your old CPU). Many of the boards that support the R7 2700, R5 3600, and obviously the 5000-series CPUs will run the 5800X3D without issues, and even some of the older R7 1700-era boards on X370-era chipsets can work (though it’s more spotty).
If we look at a couple of gaming charts from our 2700X revisit, you can see how you’ll get a performance bump from those older CPUs that feels like a totally new PC build (especially if coupling it with a drop-in GPU upgrade, so you can save on RAM, the motherboard, and the case).
The 5800X3D is also relatively low power consumption for its performance. In an all-core workload, we had it at around 108W. That makes it easy to cool for a good $30-$50 dual-tower air cooler, something like the Peerless Assassin that we reviewed.
It’s almost good enough for a modern build too, but the board cost starts affecting value for a new system, although options on eBay may open things up. Ultimately, the 5800X3D makes a ton of sense as a cost-saving, high-performance upgrade, where you can allocate what would be spent on all new components instead toward the CPU and GPU alone. That AMD has kept the platform alive this long is commendable and we hope to see this going forward. The environmental impact and e-waste impact is far lower and the value for existing owners of the platform is strong.
Original Review | Amazon (7980X) | Newegg (7980X)
The next award is for the most efficient CPU. On a technicality of actual power efficiency, based on our testing, that goes to the Threadripper 7980X 64-core CPU. At $5000, this CPU costs more than a full gaming PC for a lot of people likely referencing this list, so we’ll name its runner-up as well: The R7 7800X3D, with an honorable mention to the R9 7950X in Eco Mode.
The 7980X leads by a lot, though: In workstation applications that scale cleanly on 64 cores, the amount of time required to complete a given unit of work by the 7980X is impressive.
In our efficiency chart, the 7980X posted a 12.9 watt-hour result, with the 7800X3D previously being the most impressive modern CPU outside of utilizing Eco Mode (although the 5950X remains a leader for its era). That’s what earns the 7800X3D the runner-up status, but the 7980X is even more interesting.
As we talked about in our review, its power utilization per core is exceptionally low due to a 0.84-0.85v Vcore during all-core operation when capped with a 350W PPT. These results plus the multithreaded efficacy in all-core applications earn it the most efficient award, with the 7800X3D being one of the most effective in framerate per Watt efficiency in a lot of games.
Intel is currently way behind in all-core efficiency for desktop-class parts, with its 300W flagships propping-up the high-end CPU cooler market well.
The next award goes to the best budget CPU, where we normally target around the $150 to $200 price range. This one was hard: There aren’t many current generation options under $200. There’s the R5 7600 non-X at right around $200, then the last-gen R7 5700X makes a ton of sense for its current $170 price on Newegg, Intel has its i5-12600K (or KF) for 'cheap' now too, and there’s also an R5 7500F that isn’t officially out in the West. The R5 5600 was also in our consideration here for its reduced modern pricing. This makes choosing difficult: There are a lot of good last-gen options, but not many under $200 from newer lineups.
We’ll do this two ways: If you’re one of the many people on AM4, the R7 5700X might be one of your best budget-friendly options to get a final upgrade. It has nearly identical performance to the 5800X in gaming from the tests we ran in our original 5700X review, but tends to be cheaper. It’s not as big of a jump as the 5800X3D, but where price is a hard limiter, it could be a worthwhile midstep. The 5600 makes less sense as an upgrade just because you’d have to be upgrading from pretty low and far back on the Ryzen stack while also being budget-constrained. We’ll give the best budget CPU to the 5700X if you’re keeping an old platform.
As for something new, the R5 7600 really is worth considering: The Ryzen 7000 series launched with high pricing that reduced some of the appeal against prior generations. The 7600 is now around $200 and is often within striking distance of the 7600X. If you’re able to find a 7600X at the same price, you might as well get that instead as it is a bit faster -- although TDP is lower on the 7600.
Original Review | Amazon | Newegg
The next category is for the best high-end desktop CPU. For this, we don’t mean the literal “best,” but instead what we think would provide a strong foundation for something like a video editing machine, CPU-based rendering machine, or something dealing with Chromium-like compiles.
We’re naming the Threadripper 7970X here, and the only reason we added this CPU is because we’re very likely going to switch to the 7970X for our own editing stations.
The 7980X isn’t viable for us, but the 7970X posted excellent Adobe Premiere results in the Puget Bench while also posting particularly strong RAW video benchmark results and intraframe benchmark results. In that sense, this is a selfish pick: We’re planning to build a 7970X machine for the office because, based on our hands-on experience with it, we think it’d really help accelerate some of our video editing and rendering experience.
Original Review (13100F recent tests) | Amazon | Newegg
This one isn’t just for a budget CPU, but for the cheapest CPU that can still manage to play at least some games. We’re back with an award that’s getting increasingly difficult to assign each year: The best CPU under $100, which goes to the Intel i3-12100F right now.
We checked, and right now, the brand new CPU options under $100 are slim: There’s i3-13100F at $110 to $120, which is problematic both because it’s not below $100, but also because there are better options not distant from $120. The R5 4600G is also around, but not competitive with the 12100F in its intended use case with a dGPU. There’s also the R5 5500, but last time we reran that through the suite at the request of viewers, we found its value was worse than the 12100F. The 12100F was also just a better performer, with boosts anywhere from about 5% AVG FPS to 31% in games, or 2% to 35% in 1% lows.
We had a lot of reservations about FPS/dollar charts for reasons we explained in our 13100 review, but it does help illustrate a point here: Using the pricing of the time, that had the 12100F as one of the best value CPUs available. Higher was better here.
In an absolute sense, the i3-12100F is more than capable of playing a lot of games: The performance in F1 2022 from our test at the time had it at 270FPS AVG. It’ll struggle in some games -- like Cities: Skylines 2, assuming you’re not just completely bound-up on the GPU, or maybe Starfield with the same caveat -- but overall, for builds where you can’t spend more money, this is a good starter option when financials are the bottleneck. It really helps to give some perspective on how good a cheap CPU can be just for the basics. And this really is an important category for PC parts: Every year, we have people comment about “if you just spend another $40,” but for a lot of people, $40 more is not a “just,” it’s a make-or-break on the build. Everyone has a price limit on their hobbies, and keeping that range as tunable as possible is good. Have no illusions: The 12100F will struggle in some games and it won’t age as well, but it does fall in the “good enough” category for a lot of games, and it does come in under $100. That also helps keep board costs down.
The last category is a classic of ours: It’s for the biggest disappointment.
This year, that award goes to the entire 14th “Generation” -- and that’s the first clue. It’s not a generational iteration, but is instead a numerical one. Which is fine, except there wasn’t any meaningful uplift. The 14th series didn’t do anything to advance performance in a meaningful way, but at least briefly reset the prices. Now, the 13 and 14 series CPUs have shuffled around a little bit in price. We’re completely OK with product refreshes, but they need to be more clearly branded as such and should at least post some kind of uplift. The 14 series just didn’t do that, and the temporarily high pricing was likewise unfortunate -- although they did seem to reset.
The pricing we mentioned is from just before Black Friday is actually happening. Depending on how much things change, you're going to see some numbers move around. If things drop in price, then that may affect how much we value a processor versus something else, of course.
Based on the numbers we've given you, from our data, and the prices we have today, the decisions for the most part are pretty clear: The best gaming CPU is the 7800X3D (that's an objective fact), the most efficient part is the 7980X, the 5800X3D is the best upgrade path, and Intel makes the strongest showing in the i5-13600K or 14600K (whichever is cheaper) for a balanced build, or the 12100F for an ultra-budget build.
There are a couple of categories where it's less clear, like Best Budget. It's really not as straightforward as it used to be for us. It used to be as simple as saying “R5 2600, 200 bucks, yep, that's definitely the winner, no questions about it,” assuming it didn't win best overall or something for that year. Now though, it's difficult because some of the best CPUs are a prior generation, which feels a little weird to recommend now since they're EOL platforms. There's a lot of value in buying into a new platform if the companies (AMD specifically) do anything like AMD did with AM4. That's the one category where it was kind of difficult to nail down a single CPU, so we gave you the two options.
That covers it for the best CPUs of 2023. Again, you can find the full reviews on the site or the channel, and those will give you complete depth. This piece hopefully got you up to speed quickly so you can use it as a launching point to go do your next bit of research on the CPUs we've hopefully pointed you in the direction of. We have other roundups coming up, so check back regularly for those.
Just a quick note too, these are really fun to work on because we lose sight of just how many products ship in the computer hardware market over the course of a year. There's a lot that aren't that interesting, but compiling the most interesting ones (plus one, in this case, group of disappointing ones) into a single piece is a lot of fun. It gets us back up to speed – there's so much going on it's hard to stay on top of it all the time. Hopefully this helped you as well! Check back for more.
Megaco (resmi H.248) adalah sebuah implementasi dari Media Gateway Control Protocol arsitektur [1] untuk mengendalikan Media Gateways di Internet Protocol (IP) jaringan dan masyarakat beralih jaringan telepon (PSTN). Dasar umum arsitektur dan antarmuka pemrograman awalnya digambarkan dalam RFC 2805 dan saat ini definisi Megaco spesifik adalah ITU-T Rekomendasi H.248.1.
Megaco mendefinisikan protokol untuk Media Gateway Controller untuk mengontrol Media Gateways untuk mendukung aliran multimedia di jaringan komputer. Hal ini biasanya digunakan untuk menyediakan Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) jasa (suara dan fax) antara jaringan IP dan PSTN, atau seluruhnya dalam jaringan IP. Dalam protokol tersebut merupakan hasil kolaborasi dari kelompok kerja MEGACO Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) dan International Telecommunication Union ITU-T Study Group 16. IETF standar aslinya diterbitkan sebagai RFC 3015, yang kemudian digantikan oleh RFC 3525.
Istilah Megaco adalah sebutan IETF. ITU kemudian mengambil alih kepemilikan protokol dan versi IETF telah direklasifikasi sebagai bersejarah. ITU telah menerbitkan tiga versi H.248.1, terbaru pada bulan September 2005. H.248 mencakup bukan hanya spesifikasi protokol dasar di H.248.1, tetapi banyak ekstensi didefinisikan di seluruh H.248 Sub-series. Pelaksanaan lain Media Gateway Control Protocol arsitektur ada dalam protokol MGCP bernama sama. Ini digunakan melalui antarmuka yang sama dan mirip dalam aplikasi dan fungsi pelayanan, bagaimanapun, adalah protokol yang berbeda dan perbedaan yang mendasarinya membuat mereka tidak cocok.
Yuk, beri rating untuk berterima kasih pada penjawab soal!
Securing the best CPU cooler will protect your machine from overheating and ensure you get the best performance out of your processor. A CPU cooler is vital for any machine, but if you plan on overclocking or using a high-end CPU you will need to consider how capable your choice of cooler is.
There are two types of PC cooling options: air cooling and liquid cooling. Air coolers are often the most affordable. They involve a metal heat sink that pulls heat away from the CPU, then a fan is usually used to whip air around the heat sink and get that heat dispersed quickly. The best air cooler we've tested is the Deepcool AS500 Plus. It's a big boy with low noise levels and isn't super expensive.
Liquid cooling, sometimes referred to as water cooling, works by circulating liquid through your system via tubing. It's generally more efficient than air, though a custom water cooling loop will be more costly and require some know-how. An all-in-one cooler is the simplest liquid cooling option, and the inexpensive Arctic Liquid Freezer III 280 A-RGB is the best choice if you want to go down that route.
Each of the coolers on this list has been thoroughly tested in the PC Gamer test bench, so I can tell you which offers the most optimum CPU cooling under different workloads. If you're looking for other ways to help get rid of hot air, you can check out our guide to the best PC fans.
With years of testing various PC components under his belt, Dave knows when an air or liquid cooler is hot to trot or best left out in the cold. Building and rebuilding PCs is what Dave does day-to-day, and that means attaching and reattaching many a cooler. With that sort of exposure, Dave's come to value the small things that make coolers great, such as ease of installation.
1. Arctic Liquid Freezer III 280 A-RGB
Arctic's successor to the popular Freezer II is more than a simple update. It's by far the best overall AIO cooler you can buy right now, even if it is quite fiddly to install in many PC cases.
2. Deepcool Gammaxx L240 V2
Looking to save some pennies? You can do that and still score a capable cooler with the Deepcool Gammaxx.
3. Corsair iCUE H170i Elite Capellix XT
Huge name, huge radiator, huge cooling. The H170i Elite Capellix XT is all these things and more, but pleasingly, the price isn't all that huge for such a massive cooler.
You can usually save some money going for an air cooler, and they're still plenty capable, compact, and quiet—like the AS500 Plus.
5. Noctua NH-D15 Chromax Black
The best high-end air cooler
Noctua are top dog for fans and top dog for coolers. They can be a bit more expensive than others as a result, but you really can't fault the quality.
If you can't stand any noise whatsoever from your PC, you have to go passive. No moving parts, higher temps, but you might just survive with a cooler like this one from Noctua installed.
This page was updated on July 19 to add new recommendations for the best liquid coolers.
Best CPU 2023: the nominees
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Deepcool Gammaxx L240 V2
The best budget liquid cooler
Socket support: Intel LGA1700, LGA1200, LGA115x, LGA2066, AMD AM5, AM4, AM3, AM2, FM2, FM1
Full radiator dimensions: 280 x 120 x 27 mm
Fan speeds: 500–1800 RPM
Noise level: Up to 30 dB(A)
Effectively silent at idle
Can get loud under significant CPU load
✅ If you want great value for money: You can get smaller, cheaper liquid coolers but honestly buy an air cooler if you wanna go smaller than 240 mm (unless you need to fit cooling into a weirdly small space).
❌ If you want more bling: Beyond the colorful light show, this cooler looks cheap.
Deepcool is well known for its capable AIOs at affordable prices, and the Gammaxx L240 V2 is the best budget liquid cooler on the market. That makes it a great option for users looking to step up from air cooling into the world of AIO cooling.
The Gammaxx 240 mm features basic RGB lighting on the pump head and fans. There’s a more expensive ARGB version, should you really want it. Deepcool likes to talk about its ‘Anti-leak technology,’ which seeks to maintain an optimal pressure balance inside the loop. Which certainly can’t hurt.
The Gammaxx 240 can also cool most processors, though, like many of the chip chillers on this list, it draws the line at AMD's Threadripper beasts. But it keeps the rest running with remarkably low noise levels, which is one of the main reasons we recommend it.
At idle, the L240 is effectively silent. As you’d expect, you will start to see an increase in temperatures and noise levels with high TDP processors, especially when overclocking. Our 5800X CPU with PBO enabled is about the maximum we’d consider appropriate for a 240 mm cooler. Under load, the fans can and do ramp up quite a bit.
If you’re after a 240 mm AIO that’s inexpensive and quiet under less demanding loads, then the Deepcool Gammaxx L240 is a great choice. Sure, its noise levels can get high if you push it hard, but at this price, it comes highly recommended.
Noctua NH-D15 Chromax Black
The best high-end air cooler
Socket support: Intel LGA 1150, 1151, 1155, 1156, 1200, 2011, 2011-3, 2066, AMD AM4, AM3, AM2, FM2 & FM1 compatible
Fans: 2x NF-A15 HS-PWM
Fan speeds: 300–1500RPM
Dimensions (L x W x H): 161 x 150 x 165mm
Noise level: Max 24.6dB(A)
Awesome cooling performance
Quiet under typical loads
Louder than you might expect under load
✅ You want the very best air can offer: This is a mighty air cooler, akin to some excellent liquid coolers, and capable of cooling even high-end CPUs.
❌ You have a small case: This thing is huge. While it offers a decent memory clearance, the height of the cooler can see it rubbing up to some slimmer cases' side panels.
The Noctua NH-D15 Chromax Black is our pick for the best high-end CPU air cooler. It's also considered by many to be the best air cooler on the market. It's an easy inclusion on our list of recommended coolers. It performs brilliantly, has excellent fans that are a welcome black color instead of that rather unsightly beige and brown (sorry, Jacob), its build quality is fantastic, and Noctua's packaging, accessories, and documentation are second to none.
Really, only 360mm AIO coolers outperform it. If you want an air cooler that can handle any consumer CPU on the market, you might find one to match the Noctua flagship, but you won’t find anything that truly beats it.
Under normal operation, the NH-D15 can be considered truly silent. When pushed hard, it becomes louder than you might expect, such as you might get when hammering out an AVX load, but we don’t mind having some optional cooling headroom when you need it. Even a 5GHz+ Core i9 14900K will run quietly while gaming.
The NH-D15 also comes with two 140mm fans, which run slower than their 120mm counterparts, for quieter operation, but move plenty of air. If two of these are too loud for you, you can always remove one if needed. However, if you want to remove both for a truly silent CPU cooler, you'd best look at the Noctua NH-P1 below instead. That's actually designed to run without fans.
But why isn't the NH-15 number one on our list? It's probably overkill for many PC builds, especially if you're running your chip stock. It's absolutely overkill as a straight swap for the stock cooler that comes with many Intel and AMD chips. Perhaps the sheer size of it, too, though that can easily be forgiven considering its excellent performance.
Notably, Noctua has a long tradition of adding support for new sockets, and an investment in an NH-D15 Chromax Black means you'll have a top-shelf cooler that will last you for many years. That said, make sure to check it's compatible with your socket of choice before buying one.
The best passive CPU cooler
Type: Passive air cooling
Compatibility: Intel LGA 1200, 115x, 2011/2066; AMD AM2-AM4
Dimensions: 158 x 154 x 152 mm
Compatible with high-end CPUs
Plenty cool enough for gaming workloads
Requires a case with good airflow
✅ You want silence: There's only one way to guarantee absolute silent operation from your PC, that's with a passive cooler, no fans, and no darn HDDs.
❌ You have a high-end CPU: You'd be surprised what sort of chip this passive cooler can handle, but without a fan (optional addition) you are a bit limited on TDP.
You might see nothing more than a hulking CPU cooler at a glance, but the Noctua NH-P1 is far more exciting than that. As a passive design, it requires no fan to keep your CPU at a stable temperature. Yes, even while gaming. And if you hadn't already guessed, that's a pretty big deal for silent PC builds.
The NH-P1 is capable of cooling even high-end CPUs using only natural convection. That's sort of what makes it a big deal in the cooling world. It does this through a design vastly disparate from your standard chip chiller.
Essentially, this passive cooler can keep a decent gaming processor powered up. We've tested the NH-P1 on our Core i7 10700K open test bench—which has no fans and therefore completely unoptimized airflow—and while it may throttle on seriously CPU-intensive benchmarks, it flew on our standard gaming tests. Compare the NH-P1 to the NH-D15(Noctua's high-end CPU cooler), and you'll notice a few differences between the two. The most immediate is the density and thickness of the fins that make up most of the cooler's large size. These fins act as the fundamental heat dissipation method for an air cooler, and strangely the NH-P1 comes with fewer than the tightly packed NH-D15.
The NH-P1 also features a grid of cut-outs horizontally through the more relaxed design, which again should help airflow naturally flow across the cooler and, importantly, sap away the heat transferred into the fins from the heat pipes.
The heat pipes are undoubtedly of major importance here. Sit the NH-P1 side-by-side with the NH-D15, and you'll notice they're oriented differently. The heat pipes are the longest along their horizontal axis, which will undoubtedly impact heat dispersion due to the reliance on gravity for a heat pipe to function. The NH-P1 is a niche product with particular use cases, with some drawbacks.
It's unlikely to unlock your chip's maximum potential, and it can't be paired with a hulking triple-fan enthusiast graphics card for a good reason. All of which will rule it out for many. But what if the NH-P1 is not a CPU cooler to fit all PCs? A silent, failproof, or dust-proof design with far more capability than underpowered passive designs of the past is a massive win for PC builders limited by circumstance. And all it takes is being a little smarter about how you piece your machine together to get it all working relatively harmoniously without even a whiff of active cooling.
Read our full Noctua NH-P1 review.
