Thermalright's Silver Soul 135 is one of the few dual tower air coolers available at a budget price point of $30-$35. It pairs best with a CPU like AMD's Ryzen 7 7700X or Intel's i5-13600K, but it can handle hotter CPUs well too.
hermalright's Frozen Notte 360 aRGB lives up to the challenge of taming Intel's most difficult CPU to cool - handling up to 309W in our most demanding test with the Raptor Lake i9-13900K. However, it achieves this at the cost of noise - it's the loudest cooler we've tested in this scenario.
We take a quick look at Intel's ARC A770 LE.
Handling 66W loads with Ryzen 7700X and 156W with Intel's i9-13900K, BeQuiet's Pure Rock LP offers a compact size that will fit even the tiniest and most cramped of cases while still offering decent cooling performance and low noise levels.
We test BeQuiet's new ARGB cooler with Intel's i9-13900K, can it handle the heat?
Cooler Master's PL360 Flux 30th Anniversary edition comes with special branding and lives up to the challenge of taming Intel's most difficult CPU to cool - handling up to 309W in our most demanding test with the Raptor Lake i9-13900K. When workloads are restricted to 200W or less it runs fairly quietly, and when TDP is reduced to 125W or less it runs whisper silent.
In most common workloads, the Freezer 34 is strong enough to run Intel's i9-13900k without any limitations at all. For those who run high intensity workloads, the Freezer 34 will provide ~91% of the performance of a high end AIO. While I don't have noise level numbers in this review, I can assure you it runs fairly quietly. For most folks and the tasks they run, Arctic's Freezer 34 is a good air cooler which provides more than enough cooling to run Raptor Lake CPUs.
DeepCool's LS520 is a great cooler which provides top-tier cooling performance at a budget price. Featuring the 4th generation of DeepCool's in-house water pump design, the LS520 provides performance similar to AIOs twice as expensive at a very reasonable price of $109.99 USD. Unless you need a fancy LCD screen on your cooler, there's no reason to look at any other AIO in this author's opinion.