Phanteks PH-TC12LS CPU Cooler Review – Quiet and Low-Profile Ready

TECHNOLOGY X TEST PROTOCOL

At Technology X, we test our CPU coolers slightly different depending upon the cooler’s marketed purpose, whether it be for a silent operation or extreme overclocking.  Our goal is to test in a system that has been optimized with our SSD Optimization Guide, however, CPU C State alteration may or may not have occurred depending on the motherboard and BIOS configurations. Additionally, we also try to include links to the benchmarks used in our report so that you as the reader can replicate our tests to confirm that your cooler performs the way it should.

TECHNOLOGY X TEST BENCH

All of the components we use for testing are standard off-the-shelf PC components from major manufacturers, which can be purchased at a variety local retailers and online. We’ll also provide links to our components for those of you that find an interest in our equipment.

We’d like to thank Intel and ASRock, and Crucial for providing vital components in this test bench, without which this report would not be possible. Check out our review of the Intel Core i7 5960X, ASRock X99 OC Formula, and the Crucial Ballistix DDR4-2400 memory kit, used  in this report.

AIDA64

In order to test our CPU cooler, we’ll be running a CPU stress test and monitoring our temperatures using AIDA64, which is a great utility for benchmarking, testing the stability of, and monitoring your system.

COOLING PERFORMANCE

To test our cooler, we ran AIDA64’s ‘System Stability Test’ for 1 hour and recorded the highest temperature reached on any core. We did so at both the stock core frequency of our Intel Core i7 5960X, as well as overclocked to 3.6GHz, and 4.2GHz.

During all tests our ambient temperature was approximately 25° Celsius (or 77° Fahrenheit)

So we can see that at stock frequencies our cooler is able to keep our 5960X to rather comfortable temperatures. 73°C may seem high, but considering this is a low-profile cooler being paired with Intel’s most power-hungry CPU, it isn’t bad at all. That being said, the PH-TC12LS is not able to keep our CPU to reasonable temperatures once overclocked to our standard 4.2GHz configuration, however this is not surprising. Which is why we decided to also run tests at 3.6GHz, to show that it can in fact cool an overclocked CPU.

NOISE LEVELS

We tested the cooler’s noise output by using a sound meter placed near the system’s case with the side-panel closed. We tested the cooler at both full speed (1800 RPM) and an idle speed of 800 RPM. We also tested the sound of our overall system’s cooling without the cooler’s fan turned on to illustrate the difference. That result was an average of 35 dB.

To our ears, the PH-TC12LS’s fan is extremely quiet, in fact at our idle speed of 800 RPM it was virtually indiscernible from the noise of the rest of our system. At full speed, it was louder and definitely more noticeable, but not distracting at all.