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Review: Deepcool Castle 280EX

by Parm Mann on 7 July 2020, 15:01

Tags: Deepcool

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qaemsc

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Conclusion

...there's enough cooling potential to tame today's best consumer processors.

The Castle 280EX is a natural extension of Deepcool's liquid-cooling product line and offers many of the firm's existing features in an increasingly popular 280mm form factor.

Priced at £125, the cooler makes use of the same cylindrical pump head, whose removable lid and interchangeable logo make for easy customisation amid the customary RGB lighting. Cable clutter is kept to a minimum, and with two 140mm fans attached to the radiator, there's enough cooling potential to tame today's best consumer processors.

Given the likeable foundation, we'd liked to have seen Deepcool put more effort into refining the overall package. The mounting brackets used to secure the pump on an AMD platform are an eyesore, the absence of internal fan control makes noise an issue, and at over a hundred pounds you might expect a five-year warranty as standard.

Bottom line: Castle 280EX is a capable cooler, but lacks some of the elegance available from its immediate rivals.

The Good
  
The Bad
Chart-topping performance
Customisable pump lid
Promises never to leak
  
AMD brackets are an eyesore
No spare thermal paste
Not as quiet as the competition


HEXUS.where2buy*

The Deepcool Castle 280EX CPU cooler is available to purchase from Scan Computers.

HEXUS.right2reply

At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.



*UK-based HEXUS community members are eligible for free delivery and priority customer service through the SCAN.care@HEXUS forum.


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HEXUS Forums :: 11 Comments

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Posted by edmundhonda - Tue 07 Jul 2020 19:04
I genuinely don't know what you can learn from a cooler test without either temperatures or noise levels normalised. It runs cool but loud. Would it be louder than an H115i at the same temperature? Maybe!
Posted by QuorTek - Tue 07 Jul 2020 21:27
this is more like it.. does it actually cool stuff down… it is what I am looking for then I don'
t care how much noise or whatever as long as it is within a good field…
Posted by DR - Wed 08 Jul 2020 08:03
I genuinely don't know what you can learn from a cooler test without either temperatures or noise levels normalised. It runs cool but loud. Would it be louder than an H115i at the same temperature? Maybe!


Have you actually read this?

https://hexus.net/tech/reviews/cooling/143938-deepcool-castle-280ex/?page=3
Posted by Roobubba - Wed 08 Jul 2020 10:42
I remain confused by the ever-increasing popularity of these. They're almost always louder than good air coolers (because you have the fans *and* the pump), and they rarely outperform them. Back in the Prolimatech Megahalems days (I'm still rocking that bad boy on a second machine), and with my current Noctua NH-D14, I basically never hear the CPU cooler over the case fans or GPU fans, and that's with heavily overclocked chips that have been running at OC for 5 and ~8 years now! What's the point of all-in-one water cooling?
Posted by evs - Wed 08 Jul 2020 11:14
Air vs AIO? Well AIO's often look prettier than a giant lump of finned metal jutting from the middle of your motherboard. For some the weight is a worry also for a long period.
Really it just horses for courses, some have particular aesthetics in mind, some have budgetary constraints and so on.

Short story time : I have a machine which recently rust spotted and leaked on the AIO 280mm radiator - it had been running 14 hours a day every day 7 years so I'll go easy on it. I switched to an air cooler which is just as quiet and similar temperatures. It doesn't look as ‘pretty’ but hey was much cheaper than a new AIO on older hardware.

On the other hand the MSI 980Ti it's still rocking I changed the trifan cooler it came with to an NZXT Kraken last year and I never hear it now plus even in 25-30 degree ambient heat and it running 100% load it never gets above 60 degrees, fan wise you used to easily hear that at higher temperatures from a few feet away.

End of the day on a CPU a decent air cooler or AIO is always going to be better than a bad air cooler or AIO so pick what you like and what suits you best.

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