Installation
Mounting the radiator and CPU water block was easy … mind you I’ve done hundreds of times. Just make sure you have plenty of room to do it. As for positioning … some people like to mount the radiator on the front panel of the chassis (like me), while other like to mount the radiator on the top of the chassis. The preference is yours.
What I did find a little frustrating, was the length of the tubing. Although it’s fairly long at 348mm in length, it was just a little short when the radiator mounted in my setup using the orientation that I have below.
However, if you mount the radiator normally, both horizontally (at the top) or vertically (in the front), then the length of the tubing should be more than enough.
Test Setup
For our tests, we used a test rig which includes the ASRock Z490 Steel Legend, along with an Intel Core i9-10900K at default clock speed of 3.7GHz (turbo boost 4.9GHz / OC to 5.0 GHz), as well as 16GB of Antec Katana 7-series DDR4-3600 ram in dual channel mode.
All tests were conducted at turbo clock speeds at a resolution of 1920×1080. High or Ultra settings enabled.
| CPU | Intel Core i9-10900K @ 3.7GHz / Boost @ 4.9 GHz / OC to 5.0 GHz |
| Cooling | Antec Neptune 240 All-in-One ARGB CPU Cooler |
| Motherboard | ASRock Z490 Steel Legend |
| Ram | 16GB of Antec Katana 7-series DDR4-3600 |
| XMP profiles | Yes |
| SSD/HDD | Gigabyte Aorus Gen4 – 512GB SSD (PCIE Gen4x4) |
| PSU | Cooler Master V850W |
| VGA card | Zotac GeForce RTX 2080 AMP Extreme Core 8GB GDDR6 |
| Nvidia Drivers | Latest GeForce Drivers – WHQL |
| OS | Windows 10 |
Idle Temps
To my surprise, the idle temperatures was around 30 degrees Celsius, which I didn’t expect. I know CPU idle temps are not an indicator of cooling performance, but still … it’s much lower than I expected. Nice!
Full Load Temps
During our stress test at full load, CPU temperatures reached a high of 75 degrees Celsius, which is pretty amazing to say the least. Remember, the max TDP of the Intel Core i9-10900K is extremely high at around 125W, so getting full load temps under 80 degrees is quite an achievement. Well done Antec!
