Core i7 8700K baseline test

Core i7 8700K baseline test

Time for the essence of this review. The Deepcool Castle 240EX should be more than enough for the range of CPUs from the Pentium to the Core i7 hexa-core, or even the Core i9 octa-core. We ran the test at the default frequencies, but there should still be some room left for OC. First up is the IDLE temperature, measured when the CPU does next to nothing, just waiting for any action by the user.

Here, it’s becoming more interesting, and you can some differences. The ambient temperature was about 22 degrees C, which does affect the cooling performance for sure, but all the previous coolers were tested in similar conditions. You don’t want to have the CPU above 75-80 degrees at default frequencies, otherwise, you can assume that the cooling is surely very average/poor. This AIO cooler offers good performance but is a bit less effective than, for example, the NZXT Kraken X62 or the Asus Ryuo/Ryujin series (only by a small margin). On the next page, we’ll show you how silent the cooler is.