A proper cooling system can be the best thing for your computer, not to mention your frame rate. These Thermalright CPU coolers cover the price spectrum.
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It wasn’t that long ago that buying a high-performance CPU cooler meant shelling out big bucks for a product from brands such as Noctua, be Quiet!, or Corsair. And while there was little to fault products like the venerable Noctua NH-D15 from a cooling standpoint, the prices of these high-end products likely kept more than a few users away, no matter how often they were told to never cheap out on cooling. Thankfully, for those who can’t quite stretch to the top-end of the cooler market, the past few years have seen something of a revolution in the CPU cooler space, all thanks to brands like Thermalright.
Now, to be clear, Thermalright has been around for a while. Its SP97 passive cooler, for example, was quite well-regarded by silent PC aficionados in the early 2000s, so don’t mistake the company for an upstart. That said, the Taiwanese firm has recently gone all-out with its CPU coolers, launching a seemingly endless range of air and all-in-one (AIO) CPU coolers. While not all are necessarily amazing, a few have combined excellent thermal performance with impressively affordable prices, sitting aside (or even displacing) the old guard in many best-of lists as of late.
We’ve gone through reputable Thermalright CPU cooler reviews to assemble a list of five products worth considering. However, our goal was to cover as many bases as possible, so variety was also a guiding factor in our selection — more on that at the end. In the meantime, let’s get started.Thermalright Assassin Spirit 120 V2 Plus – $18.59
Available for just under $20 on Amazon at the time of writing, the Thermalright Assassin Spirit 120 V2 Plus is not going to win any awards for outright cooling performance. But what the Assassin Spirit 120 lacks in pure cooling prowess, it makes up for in price, making it a great option if your stock CPU cooler isn’t cutting it anymore.
The Assassin Spirit 120 V2 Plus is a single-tower cooler with four 6mm heatpipes and two fans, both of which run at 1,500 rpm and generate a claimed 25.6 dB of noise. None of this is especially outstanding, and test results back that up. Tom’s Hardware paired it with two of Intel’s top-end chips, an older Core i7-14700K — in its heyday, one of Intel’s best gaming chips — and a new Core Ultra 9 285K, and the budget Thermalright placed at the bottom of the charts in the most intense tests.
For example, the Core 9 Ultra hit a brutal 96 degrees Celsius in a 253-watt Cinebench R23 test, which admittedly isn’t a good look. But bear in mind that this is a sub-$20, single-tower cooler, and that’s to be expected. YouTube channel Gamers Nexus found that the original, single-fan version of the Spirit 120 was a great cooler for the price; it beat the $85 Noctua NH-U125 in a noise-normalized test with an AMD Ryzen 5 3600, posting a 38.1-degree Celsius delta over ambient compared to 39.1 for the Noctua. You’ll likely get the same performance, if not slightly better, from the V2.Thermalright Royal Knight 120 SE – $27.59
With that name, you’d probably be forgiven for thinking that the Thermalright Royal Knight 120 SE is one of the company’s more premium offerings. Yet that’s not really the case, as it still comes in at an affordable $27.59 as we’re writing this. The Royal Knight 120 SE is something of a specialized offering, being a dual-tower cooler with no restrictions on RAM height.
