Thermalright ARO-M14

Introduction

Air coolers have vastly improved over the past few years and nowadays can offer some pretty impressive cooling performance. They now also come in a number of shapes and sizes, from the beastly dual tower coolers that offer maximum performance to the smaller top down coolers that are designed to offer better performance than a stock cooler. CPU cooling is an important part of any PC build and with a multitude of options available, it can easily become a daunting task. Thermalright is a top-notch manufacturer of exceptional PC-cooling products. Offering high quality heatsinks and fans, they have become a mainstay for enthusiasts looking for traditional heatsinks and fans over all-in-one liquid coolers. They don't stop at just CPU coolers, either. Their product lineup includes CPUs, video cards, memory, mosfets, and even gaming consoles. Just in time for the Ryzen 2000, Thermalright release an new cooler. Available in two variants, the ARO-M14G with a grey top-plate, and the ARO-M14O, with a "Ryzen Orange" top-plate, the two new coolers are heavily based on the company's HR-02 Macho Rev B cooler, but feature socket AM4 retention modules (support no other socket). They have a TDP rating of up to 240 watts. With such a large surface area for heat dissipation and six 6 mm heatpipes, this cooler is quite imposing. But let's take a closer look at what the ARO-M14G has to offer before forming a definite opinion.

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Specifications.

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Packaging & Bundle

The Thermalright ARO-M14G comes in a orange/grey box with their logo, and a large faded image of the unit on both the front and back.

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The specifications and features of the unit can be seen on the sides of the box.

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The top just has ARO-M14G in white.

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Within the box sits a lot of hard foam which is protecting the cooler from any damage. It comes in two parts which break away from each other which makes it easier to gain access to the cooler. It also makes it easier to box up (should you ever want to get rid of it or relocate it) too. Oh, and for the record,I hate photographing white foam!

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The Thermalright ARO-M14G comes with a mounting kit that supports only the latest AMD Ryzen and Ryzen 2000 CPUs. The package came with a Phillips head screwdriver stamped with Thermalright's name and logo,but it's of a surprisingly good quality so i had no shame using it. In case you need a re-install later on, there is also an extra 1 gram tube of Thermalright's Chill Factor compound included. It has extra fan clips for adding an extra 140mm fan later on.

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Among other accessories i should mention installation manual.

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A Closer Look

The ARO-M14G is a beast, measuring 162H x 115W x 140D mm without a fan and weighs 720g.

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It features a single fin-stack tower design.

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Taking a look at the ARO-M14G from the front,we can see all the heatpipes and their unique design coming from the contact plate.

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The fins are rather thin, only 0.4 mm thick on average, making them prone to bending, particularly at the corners.The fin spacing is very generous,about 3.12 mm, ideal for low airflow situations. Lots of testing has gone on in the Thermalright laboratory and the point behind these fins and holes are to direct airflow in a more channelled manor rather than having it go anywhere and everywhere.

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What this in turn provides is better cooling performance whilst still remaining completely silent at the same time. When the cooler is used in conjunction with the proprietary add-on kit that is supplied by Thermalright, there can be as much as a 10% improvement in the cooling performance of this cooler when used in passive modes.

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The ARO-M14 is also visually striking as the cooler is equipped with an anthracite or orange anodised top fin, giving the customer options when colour coordinating the cooler with the rest of their system. The cooler also have an embossed Ryzen logo on the top-plate. Visible at the top are the "through holes", slits punched into every fin to increase ventilation.

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From the top we can see those six 6mm heat pipes more closely. You can also see an extra set of fan clip holes on the other side should you wish to do push-pull.

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The big hole at the center acts a screwdriver access point for mounting the cooler.

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The fin-stack is not centered over the base but rather pushed to one side. From this angle, you can also see the bottom design of the fins which contain the holes for the airflow channelling as mentioned previously.

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A bit closer look at how the heatpipes come out from the contact plate and their unique design. An ultimate cooler would not be complete with no less than six heatpipes to carry heat away from the base and into the large surface area what is of course one of the key features of the Thermalright ARO-M14G. The heatpipes are 6mm in diameter and they are,according to Thermalright,ideal for high TDP processors.

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The "spaghetti junction" of heat pipes. They arranged in a U-shaped, zig-zag array which is divided into different sections of the fins stack ensures even distribution of heat out of the CPU. A look from the bottom shows the unique distribution of heatpipes spread into different sections of the fin stack.The heatpipes of the ARO-M14G are designed to reduce clearance issues.

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The heat pipes are soldered to the cooler's base, too.The base is machined flat coated with polished nickel. It is beautifully finished and makes very good contact with the CPU as a result of its flatness and smoothness. One of the things i like about Thermalright is that they always use a nice mirror-like finish on the C1100 pure-copper base used in their coolers.

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Thermalright ships the ARO-M14G with its ultra-quiet TY-147A fan, which runs at 300 to 1300 RPM, hurls a breezy 28.3 to 73.6 CFM of air and produces up to 21dBA of noise. Seven Silent Torpedo Blades-"submerges", gives most quiet and efficient airflow.

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Two Ball Bearing-to ensure consistent and stable rpm,prolonged lifetime of usage.

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Aerodynamic body-Less friction around the edges and give more centered and concentrated airflow.

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Installation Process

Since we will not be testing this cooler passively inside of our open air chassis, we needed to install the rubber fan isolation pads first.

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If you were to forget these while using the fan, you would notice there is some movement to the fan once it is installed, and that can lead to chattering of the fins from the vibrations in the fan.

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Before you begin, remove the two plastic mounting-rails located to the left and right of the
CPU socket. Leave the original backplate in place, as you will need it to secure the AM4 screw pillars.

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Next, screw the AM4 Screw Pillars into the backplate. Then you need to screw the standoffs down onto the motherboard, making sure the end with the washer is against the PCB.

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Once that is completed, you can set the top bracket onto the standoffs, and use the short screws to secure it to the rest of the hardware. Thermalright have also improved the installation by pre-applying the thermal compound.

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There is a small change in favor of a more pleasant installation: The retaining bar of the radiator is now already integrated in the base plate, which means that one component can slip less during the mounting process. There is still room to get to the motherboard screws with it installed, and it does allow for a card to install in the top slot of the motherboard too. This is a heavy tower cooler, though, and we do not recommend using this cooler if you want to travel with your chassis, as it has the potential to cause a lot of issues if allowed to be jostled around.

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Installed - Memory Clearance

Since the ARO-M14G is also offset to move the body of the tower to the back of the motherboard, when it comes to memory on this side of the cooler, even with the fan installed, we have plenty of room, and the height of the RAM makes no difference either.

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It leaves plenty of room for memory to go there, even if they are taller than naked or low-profile options.

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Test System & Methology

Test System:

Cpu:AMD Ryzen 7 1700X
Motherboard:Asrock x370 Taichi
Memory:G. Skill Trident Z RGB F4 - 3866 C 18 Q - 32 GTZR
Graphics Card: Sapphire HD 6970
Power Supply: Antec HCG 750W
Storage Drive: 3TB Seagate Barracuda
Boot Drive: Ocz Vector 480GB
Chassis:
Dimastech Bench Table Easy V2.5

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Software:

PRIME 95
CPUID HW Monitor 1.23
CPUID CPU-Z 1.65
AIDA64

I am testing the performance as follows:

PRIME 95 is run for 10 minutes and then the average maximum temperatures as recorded by CPUID HWMonitor are noted. The average temperature across the four cores is taken on our quad core processor. Celsius temperatures are used and i keep the ambient at 22 (+/- 1) degrees for all testing. Celsius temperatures should correct for any marginal ambient differences between 21-23 degrees. Acoustic measurements are taken 10cm horizontally away from the CPU cooler with the VGA fan disabled,hard drive in idle and power supply isolated. These are taken at desktop idle and AIDA64 load.The cooling performance tests are run at overclocked 3.9GHz settings.Voltages are fixed to prevent inaccuracy between comparisons. Each test is repeated 3 times with 3 remounts for consistency of results

Temperature

It is no surprise that Thermalright's ARO-M14G aces the Idle test. It may not top the chart, but falls in line with expectations, so there is nothing to worry about here.

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However, with the CPU overclocked, the ARO-M14G falls behind Noctua's top-of-the-line cooler by 3?C.

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Noise Level

The ARO-M14G jumps to the top of the chart. Thermalright shows us that the TY-147A fan is a solid choice when it comes to silence, as at idle, delivering only 32 dB of noise. Even when it came to allowing the fan to spin as fast as possible, at reported speeds of 1350 RPM, we were pleased to find the TY-147A still at the top of the list.

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Conclusion

You know,I was just thinking anno the year 2018 there really aren't bad performing coolers produced anymore. For every segment and budget you can find something you need. The market stabilized and within the entire range and scope of heatpipe based coolers there's a certain comfort zone with a corresponding product available. As a result,most of these coolers available on the market are all adequate at the very least. There are always exceptions to this, there's a handful of manufacturers out there that offer the really interesting stuff, the kit and gear that really stand out from the cooling crowd, the hardware you and me crave and need so badly...that is in the enthusiast domain of gaming hardware. And that's where we need to make a stop at Thermalright as they tick all those boxes. The performance of Thermalright ARO-M14 compete with some of the higher end coolers, including some All-in-One (AIO) liquid coolers. The holes and extra fan clips needed for attaching a second fan (think push/pull) are there. Thermalright did NOT provide an extra fan for push/pull but to be honest i only found that we only gained a 1-2c better cooling performance, so with a little extra noise and cost I wouldn’t bother adding a second fan. I found the installation process a breeze. The aspects which stand out as unique selling points with ARO-M14 are the excellent memory clearance. I found no clearance issues at all. The other point to note is that noise levels were very low,even with the fan at full speed – compared to other models it was by no means disruptive.

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This heatsink is basically a Ryzen AM4 compatible version of the HR-02 Macho heatsink. Thermalright produced a pair of CPU coolers only for the AM4 sockets which means that you will be only using these on Ryzen CPUs and not on any other platform. However, at least in the next two years, customers will not have to worry about that because AMD will maintain the AM4 socket until at least 2020, according to the current roadmap. Price wise the ARO-M14 is without a doubt a good product, and they do price the ARO-M14 competitively, clocking at 49.99€ Euro where as similar products from other high end brands cost 15-25 Euro more. There is plenty within the bundle to warrant the price, combine this with the quality and silence on offer and it isn’t a bad deal by any stretch. Thermalright have a proven track record for delivering brilliant products and the ARO-M14 is no exception. ARO-M14 offers memory compatibility clearance and build quality. It performs very well for both thermal results and noise levels.

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