Performance
Test setup and Testing Methodology
The system used for testing is listed in the table below. Ambient temperatures were kept at 24 degrees Celsius +/- 1 degree. The thermal paste used was Noctua’s NT-H2 (for testing consistency). The cool and quite mode was set to default. The fan speed and pump was set to Full speed. The idle temperatures were recorded after 10 minutes of idle and max temperatures were recorded after a 5 minute torture test using Adia 64 System Stability Test and recording the Cores values reported and averaging them.
| CPU | Intel Core i5-8600K @ 3.6GHz (Coffee Lake) |
| Cooling | Cougar Aqua ARGB 240 |
| Motherboard | Asus ROG Maximus X Hero Z370 |
| Ram | Zadak Spark RGB DDR4-4133 32GB Kit |
| HDD | Samsung 960 EVO 250GB PCIE M.2 SSD |
| PSU | Thermaltake Toughpower Grand RGB 850W |
| OS | Windows 10 |
Now we get to the good stuff the results. I apologize for my cooling catalogue being rather slim, but as more coolers come in we will continue to grow this list. As you can see in the graph below we have the Idle temps for the Cougar Aqua ARGB 240. This chip hovers at a cool 26.5 degrees Celsius. Almost ambient temps and honestly idle temps are irrelevant because of the lower clocks at idle.
Alright LOAD temps! The ones that really matter. The Cougar Aqua ARGB 240 performed pretty well coming in at 45.75 degrees Celsius. Only time will tell where this cooler will rank in future tests but I am pretty confidant it will compete with the best of them as the cooler manages to crank out decent temps!
Noise can be a important factor for some. If we have a open case design and the fans might be exposed, we don not want record setting noise coming from our cooler. This not the case with the Cougar Aqua ARGB 240. As you can see in the graph above the fans at full speed hit 37 dBs. Just to note, the actually hearable noise from the fans are not distracting at all.
Now lets move on to the Conclusion and Verdict!
