I have one of Noctua’s flagship air CPU coolers - the NH-D15 chromax.black - and one of Corsair’s flagship liquid coolers - the RX Titan 280mm AIO. Which is best? Which do I prefer? Well that’s exactly what I answer in this video, showing thermal camera results, stress tests including Furmark and Prime95, and more. I also discuss which is easiest to install (hint: Noctua!) but why the added complexity of Corsair’s RX Titan AIO cooler might actually be a GOOD thing… for some people.

(Link to direct YouTube video)

If you prefer text over video, please read on for the guide/transcript version of this video.

Video Transcript And Guide

Hey everyone! Whenever I’ve done computer builds in the past, I’ve always defaulted to air coolers because they’re just simple and sleek and just tend to work really well. Well, I can’t say this is sleek, ‘cause it’s obviously a chunky boi. This is Noctua’s flagship, the NH-D15, the chromax.black variant. This one’s the flagship, and it’s got really good cooling performance considering it’s only an air cooler.

But recently, I was given the opportunity to test out Corsair’s new flagship, the RX Titan all-in-one cooler. So I thought it’d be pretty cool to actually do a video comparing Noctua’s air flagship with Corsair’s all-in-one liquid flagship, which I thought would be pretty interesting. And I haven’t just, you know, run Prime 95 and tested that out; I’ve also used my thermal camera and I’ve monitored noise and exhaust temperatures and a whole lot more so we can get a really good idea of actually how these two coolers stack up.

For full disclosure, though, before we carry on, I should say that Corsair did send me their all-in-one cooler to actually test out, but I’m not under contract and I’m not being paid to say nice things about the product or anything like that. This is a fully independent video, and I genuinely love air coolers. So actually in this video, it’s not like I’m going to be bashing Noctua’s offerings and trying to sell you Corsair offerings or something like that. There are issues with an all-in-one cooler which I’ll really talk about in this video.

First, I wanted to talk about which is easier to install. We might know many of the build steps, but I still wanted to recap it because there’s pros and cons to both.

So with the Noctua cooler, you’ve got the spacers—this is an AMD system, of course—then I’ve got the AMD metal spacer, then you screw them in place, which I always find a bit fiddly, but you know, it’s easy enough as well. Then obviously just screw them all in, there’s going to be four screws in total. And then once your CPU is in, you put the Noctua cooler on. Obviously, if it’s a new cooler, you’ll have thermal paste pre-applied; otherwise, you’ll need to put that on. And then you simply screw the Noctua cooler into place, tighten the screws evenly so there’s even pressure, and then you mount both fans for the D15. Then you plug it into a motherboard header, or you use a Y splitter, ‘cause otherwise you need to apply it to two different headers if you have those two fans. And this is the final effect. I think it looks really nice and sleek. Obviously, there’s no RGB, but that’s kind of part of the point—it’s just nice and sleek.

So that’s the Noctua air cooler. All fairly simple: it just goes into one motherboard header, or maybe a splitter, and then you’ve got to faff around with a bracket a little bit, but then it’s installed and you can just move on with your life.

But what about the Corsair all-in-one cooler, the RX Titan? So it comes with Intel brackets by default. You might need to switch over to the AMD brackets if you’ve got an AMD processor, of course. And then you keep the stock backplate, but you remove the standard stock cooler plastic brackets, and then you just mount the all-in-one cooler directly onto it. There’s no other fiddly brackets or anything like that because the brackets actually live on the air cooler. And then you screw it in and make sure it’s tight and everything else, and then you put the cap on, as you can see there. All fairly simple.

But what’s not as easy is the radiator, which will be a bit more fiddly if you’ve got, you know, front panel cables in the way. Make sure you move them out the way, but eventually you should be able to get the radiator into position. And then you need to screw it in, and it’s going to be a lot of screws—a lot more than an air cooler, for example. But yeah, you just keep going and putting as many screws as you need. I think mine actually needed eight, but you might actually need 12 or 16 screws. It just varies.

But then you actually come to plug into the headers, and many all-in-one coolers need a CPU fan header and a pump fan header, but Corsair does it slightly differently actually. So if we just zoom in here, you can see it’s installed there. We’ve actually got this black cable coming out of it that is not going into a fan header directly. What’s actually happening instead is you need a system hub for this particular one, and it’s included in the box. It has got various connectors you need, and the Corsair system hub actually needs six-pin PCIe Express power, which is what this adapter is for. So you plug one end into the actual Corsair system hub, and then the other end will actually go to the power supply unit, which I’ll show in a minute.

You also need a USB 2 header to plug that into the system hub, and then you’ve got this USB 2.0 header which, of course, has to go into the motherboard, as you can see there. I’m just plugging into one of the many headers—thankfully I got a lot spare. Then you need PCI Express power, as I mentioned. I had an RTX 5080 here. I didn’t actually have any eight pins available, so I plugged in a new one. And then obviously I just got to get that two-pin thing out the way, ‘cause this is a six-pin power. But once I’ve got that and it’s plugged into my PSU, I can now power my system hub.

Finally, you need to make sure you have some sort of CPU fan header plugged in so your system can boot. You use the included cable, you plug one end into the motherboard and the other into the system hub. And then this is the final result. As you can see there, it looks really nice and sleek. You got different face caps you can use, like LCD screens. This is just the basic one, and actually I really like it. It’s sleek and understated and looks really good.

That’s clearly more complicated. You can’t just plug, like, a CPU fan header in. You’ve also got to have a free USB 2 header on your motherboard and six-pin PCIe Express power free as well, which not everyone will have.

If you do, you might be wondering, “Why did you need to do all that just to set up an all-in-one cooler?” But actually, you’re not just getting an all-in-one cooler with that. I mean, you are if this is all you’ve bought, but what you also have is an entry point into Corsair’s ecosystem. Because now you could actually go out and buy Corsair’s newest fans and easily set them up with just one single wire, even if you’ve got, like, eight fans.

So I’ve got here, for my front fans, I actually wanted three intakes, 120 mil ones. And you actually clip them together—one of them has a little data thing, and the other is just a plastic thing to keep it together. So you put both of those in a fan, click them together, and they are now connected together in a smart way. You need to actually connect them with a single cable so they can actually talk to the rest of the iCUE system. So I plugged one end into my radiator, and then the other end just goes into one of the fans, top or bottom, it doesn’t really matter. It’s all quite simple, and it’s a really nice, sleek finish, as you can see there.

And now I could go into, like, the iCUE software and actually configure things exactly how I’d like, which is pretty neat. That all looks great, and I really do like the look of things when you’ve got the Corsair Link fans as well. It does look really nice. And then you can dive into the iCUE software on Windows and actually configure things and have common lighting schemes, all of that. So that is really nice.

It’s kind of swings and roundabouts, or personal preference, as to which you’d actually prefer. You know, if you want that ecosystem and RGB lighting that can mirror games and stuff, you might want to do that, but it will cost you a lot of money—and a lot more money than just buying, like, a Noctua air cooler and a couple of cheap case fans from Arctic or whatever. You know, that will be a much cheaper option. But overall, you know, if you do want RGBs in a more fancy ecosystem, then actually the all-in-one cooler is pretty nice.

And another benefit of it is it takes up a lot less space inside your case than the Noctua flagship cooler. And unfortunately, whether you go with, like, an AMD graphics card or Intel or NVIDIA, you’re probably going to have this issue, ‘cause the Noctua D15 is pretty big. You can see there’s just very little clearance there. I’ll zoom in a little bit now, and what this means is it’s very hard to get to the PCI Express latch if you wanted to remove your graphics card. And actually, even hooking in the fans and stuff is very difficult, to be honest.

That compares with, like, the Corsair flagship, where you can easily get access to the NVMe drive and also the PCI Express latch. Where “easy” is—it’s never going to be completely easy, but, you know, often you can access those things without needing to remove your cooler, which is pretty nice. So that is quite interesting.

But it is worth pointing out that not all all-in-one coolers are as sleek as Corsair’s one. For example, you can get all-in-one coolers with massive LCD screens that go around the cooler, and actually they’re going to naturally take up more space inside your case than Corsair’s one. Equally, not every CPU cooler is a thick boy like the Noctua flagship. For example, this is a mini one from Thermaltake, I believe. Yeah, it’s Thermaltake, and actually it’s a lot smaller. Like, if we put it side by side, you can see just how much smaller it is than Noctua’s flagship. And again, then you might have less issues with actually getting to your PCI Express release latch and things like that. So that is worth knowing.

But that’s enough of the practicalities. Let’s actually move on to the test results.

So for the first thermal test I wanted to carry out, I actually used FurMark, the Fury Donut. And I know that that’s a GPU tester, but the reason I use that is because many graphics cards are going to pump hot air into the path of the CPU. So I wanted to gauge how that would work, and especially that’s the case of my RTX 5080 Founders Edition. But when running FurMark for quite some time, you can see there the CPU temps were hovering around 40 to 50°C, and ambient temperatures were 21° throughout all of these tests, and probably upper end of 40°C, to be honest, as you can see there. And this is testing with my Noctua air cooler.

But how does that actually compare to the Corsair one? I’ll put them both side by side now, and actually you can see there’s not, like, a significant difference between the two. But the Corsair all-in-one cooler with liquid did actually tend to have a few degrees lower Celsius than the Noctua air cooler.

Next, I switched on over to my AMD graphics card, the 9070 XT, and actually all the FurMark results were fairly similar, with the all-in-one cooler having a few degrees Celsius less temperatures than the Noctua air cooler. So instead, I wanted to do a slightly different test and actually monitor the exhaust temperatures.

So I got a really small thermometer in the exhaust fan so I could actually monitor, ultimately, how hot your room would, you know, get when gaming and everything else. And I did a bunch of benchmarks and gaming, and I then used the thermometer to actually monitor the maximum temperatures. And there wasn’t actually that much difference, as you can see here, comparing the Noctua air one to the Corsair AIO. It was usually 1 or 2° average maximum, which is pretty good. I think it’s a good result for both. But obviously, the Corsair cooler would keep your room slightly cooler. Certainly, temperatures were a little bit lower on Corsair’s flagship, the all-in-one cooler, the Titan, compared to Noctua’s flagship. But equally, it wasn’t a substantial difference either. It’s not like when gaming, your Noctua cooler is going to, you know, heat up your room to 40°C, whereas your all-in-one cooler will keep it at 20°C. You’re not going to see that much difference.

But next, I wanted to look at actually stress-testing the CPU to actually put these both through their paces. Oh, Prime 95, how we love you! I know there’s more modern tests, but I still like using this just to really hammer the CPU and see what the temps are doing. And actually, yeah, you can see with the air cooler there, things are often in the 80 or 90°C range, compared to my Corsair all-in-one cooler, which was, you know, in the 50°C range. So there was quite a big difference here.

And I performed these tests loads of different times; it was the same story. At least with Prime 95, the all-in-one cooler wins. This is one area where the air versus liquid debate really does show a big difference, in my mind. Because I know Prime 95 is a bit of an artificial test, but actually, the Noctua cooler wasn’t really dealing with it all that well. I mean, it didn’t thermal throttle—it’s not like my CPU was throttling down or anything like that. But, aye, my Noctua cooler was leading to higher temperatures than my Corsair all-in-one cooler was. Actually, I was quite impressed with the results from that. But obviously, when you’re gaming, it’s rare that your CPU is going to be hit quite as much as the Prime 95 stress test or anything like that. But I just wanted to show off that there is that difference there.

The other big difference was the noise. Because when running Prime 95, my Noctua cooler was very, very loud. You could hear the fans absolutely loads. However, I was actually pleasantly surprised with my Corsair all-in-one cooler, the Titan RX, because actually that didn’t make that much noise at all, to be honest.

It can sometimes be hard to actually compare noise levels on a YouTube video because YouTube does funny things with autobalancing the audio levels nowadays. But that’s why I actually kept the mouse click in there, so you could actually hear that in comparison to the system noise. And you might actually have been able to hear as well that the actual exhaust fans, so the air fans on my case, were actually louder than the all-in-one cooler noise as well, you know, the actual whirring pump noise you’re going to get.

But for my next test, I wanted to use a thermal camera, and I switched on over to my other graphics card, AMD’s 9070 XT, for these particular tests. So let’s dive into them.

So it’s always fun using a thermal camera. And to begin with, I wanted to use my Noctua air cooler. And actually, if I was gaming or doing something like that, the graphics card is the hottest thing, which is what that small moving red arrow thing actually is. That’s the maximum—42°C. The actual center, which is focused on the Noctua cooler, is at, like, 28-29°, so not particularly hot at all, to be honest.

Now, if we look at the two top exhaust fans, what you actually notice is, I’ve got this 140 mil fan there—it’s barely getting any heat at all. This one, to its credit, is actually getting some heat output, 35 or 36°C. But of those two top exhausts, one of them wasn’t really doing anything at all. And then if we look at the rear exhaust fan, that’s actually the thing that’s getting, you know, more heat coming out of it. 35°C, and then the max—I think is actually picking up something slightly different. But really, that rear exhaust fan is doing more of the work with a Noctua air cooler.

And then we come back to this view, and you can see that actually the motherboard and the graphics card is actually running hotter than the CPU cooler, which is by design. The actual cooler itself doesn’t tend to get too hot. So really, the Noctua air cooler done absolutely fine there. Even when running Prime 95, the actual metal (cooling) fins didn’t get overly warm or anything like that.

But next, I wanted to take a look at the thermal camera’s perspective of the Corsair flagship cooler. So again, I done a bunch of tests here, whether it was FurMark or running Prime 95 or gaming. What would often happen was a similar story to the Noctua cooler, really, which was that the actual cooler itself, or the pump in this case, wasn’t that hot, and the hottest thing was often the graphics card. And yeah, you can see there, really, in a lot more detail, the graphics card is often 66°C, for example, and actually the Corsair all-in-one pump is not hot whatsoever—it’s actually one of the colder parts of the case.

Then when we look at the top, the actual radiator, you can see there there’s not that much heat actually coming off the radiator, which is by design. That’s pretty good. And then you look at your rear exhaust fan—this is going to be taking more of the heat, but even then, you know, it is running a bit cooler than we’ve seen with the Noctua exhaust fan. And again, we can look at a close-up view here, and the Corsair pump and cooler doesn’t get particularly warm. You know, your GPU and motherboard will get hotter than the actual pump.

But that really sums up a lot of the tests I’ve done. But which do I actually prefer? Like, if I was given a choice, would I choose the Corsair one or the Noctua one? Well, spoiler alert, I’m probably going to sit on the fence because my answer is “it depends.” Like, if you simply want something simple and sleek, and you’re not that interested in RGB, then the Noctua air cooler will be absolutely fine. Yeah, if you’re running Prime 95, then the temperatures will get quite high. In some games, it’ll get quite high too, compared to the Corsair all-in-one cooler that done a brilliant cooling job. But it does kind of come down to personal preference and, of course, cost. Because the Corsair all-in-one cooler is more expensive than the Noctua one. So yes, the Corsair cooler gets better performance; this also comes at a higher cost. So that is worth knowing about.

But one of the differences was noise, and I spoke about it earlier on. But actually, under load, my all-in-one cooler was a lot quieter than my air cooler. But then when I actually went back to idle, like just web browsing after gaming or whatever, what I actually noticed is my Noctua air cooler actually went quieter quite quickly, whereas the pump on my Corsair all-in-one cooler—I could actually hear that for around 5 to 10 minutes. It would take a little while to ramp down.

And that kind of wraps up my views on things. I actually still like both of these coolers. I wouldn’t in the future say I’ll only use, you know, all-in-one coolers or only use air coolers. I think actually they’re both good, depending on your circumstances. But certain for, you know, short bouts of gaming or even longer bouts of gaming, an all-in-one cooler did work out really well.

If you’ve got any questions of your own, please let me know down in the comments. And if you enjoyed this video, please click the thumbs up button, and please subscribe to see more videos like this. Thanks for watching!