5 Of The Best Thermalright CPU Coolers, Ranked By Price

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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.

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.

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.

RAM clearance can become an issue once you move to a dual-tower cooler, as some will hang over your motherboard's DIMM slots and limit the height of your RAM modules. Cooler manufacturers have tried to overcome this in various ways, including cooling fin cutouts, but Thermalright has opted to offset the whole cooler toward the rear of your PC case. This gives the Royal Knight 120 SE a slightly strange side profile, but the upshot is that you won't have any RAM clearance issues. So if you're looking to install a kit from one of the major RAM brands, this may be the affordable cooler for you.

So you get great RAM clearance at a great price, but what about performance? In Tom's Hardware's test, it managed to equal a budget 240mm AIO when cooling an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D, with a 56.2-degree Celsius delta. It also performed well on an Intel i7-14700K, nearly equaling a big-boy 360mm AIO — albeit with slightly noisy fans. YouTuber Welshytech had even better results with an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, where the Royal Knight outperformed the be Quiet! Dark Rock Pro 5, a premium $120 cooler.

If there's a signature Thermalright cooler, it might just be the Thermalright Phantom Spirit 120. Launched in 2023 to critical acclaim, the Phantom Spirit 120 is a dual-tower cooler that draws heat away from your CPU via seven 6-mm heatpipes, with two 120mm fans running at 1,500 rpm each providing the airflow.

Hardware Canucks loved the Spirit 120, not least because it almost equaled the Noctua NH-D15 when cooling an Intel Core i9-13900K in gaming and synthetic scenarios. The Spirit 120, which was about a third of the price of the Noctua at the time, posted a 48.5-degree Celsius delta in the latter test, compared to the NH-D15's 48.0-degree delta — good enough for the outlet to hail it as one of the best CPU coolers on the market at the time. And, just to be clear, it wasn't that much more expensive when new, either, at just over $40; it's been an amazing bargain from day one and arguably a no-brainer if you're looking for a dual-tower cooler and don't have any specific compatibility or aesthetic needs.

While we think the Phantom Spirit 120 (or nearly-identical Phantom Spirit 120 SE) is the CPU cooler to get for most users and rigs, Thermalright has an alternative for buyers who want a bit more bling — and, potentially, better cooling. The Thermalright Phantom Spirit 120 Evo features higher-performance ARGB fans, making for a slightly flashier cooler that, at worst, equals its predecessor and, at best, outperforms it by a couple of degrees Celsius or so, according to TechPowerUp's testing.

Usually, CPU air coolers come with either 120mm or 140mm fans, but Thermalright has opted for something different with the Thermalright Royal Pretor 130. The Royal Pretor 130 opts for a 130mm fan in the middle position, with a 120mm front fan for better RAM compatibility. It takes full advantage of that larger fan (or is it the other way around?), too, with the fin stacks measuring 5.11 inches (130mm) wide.

The Royal Pretor's slightly unorthodox fan setup extends to the fan thickness too; these measure 28mm compared to the 25mm-thick fans most other coolers use. Thicker fans are often better, and the extra dimensions do seem to give the Royal Pretor 130 an edge. Tom's Hardware went so far as to claim that the Royal Pretor 130 "raises the bar" for air cooling, and its results show why. The Royal Pretor 130 placed amongst a bunch of high-end AIOs when tasked to handle an Intel Core i7-14700K at full tilt, allowing the CPU to boost up to 259 watts. 

In terms of raw temperature data, the Royal Pretor 130 kept an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X at a 53.2-degree Celsius delta, only beaten by the Arctic Liquid Freezer III Pro 360, which posted a 46.2-degree delta. Hardware Canucks admittedly wasn't quite as thrilled, but the big cooler still put in strong (if not class-leading) numbers, especially on its Intel i9-13900K test bench. There, the Royal Pretor 130 managed a 70-degree delta at the 13900K's 253-watt max power draw, outperforming other Thermalright offerings like the Phantom Spirit 120 SE.

In many — if not all — cases, a 360mm AIO with ARGB fans will cost a pretty penny. Even a great non-ARGB 360mm AIO, like the Arctic Liquid Freezer III Pro 360, retails for over $100. So the fact that Thermalright has managed to offer the Thermalright Aqua Elite 360 V3 for under $60 should cause some concern: Can it really be any good?

As it turns out, yes. Robeytech tested the Aqua Elite 360 V3 on both Intel (Core i7-14700K) and AMD (Ryzen 7 7700X) test platforms and found that Thermalright's budget AIO was a solid, middle-of-the-pack performer on both, at least in the channel's heavy-duty load tests. Overall temperatures were in the 80-degree Celsius range: 82.48 degrees on Intel and 86.79 on AMD. Gaming temperatures, expectedly, were much lower and in the 50s on both. Tom's Hardware also tested the Aqua Elite 360 V3 and considered it a reasonably strong AIO with perfectly competent — just not spectacular — temperatures on an Intel Core i7-13700K.

While that may not sound like a ringing endorsement, this is a roughly $50 AIO we're talking about. The fact that it's solid and reasonably easy to install is already pretty great. Now, of course, unless you're an expert, you should probably think twice about water-cooling your PC. But if you're dead-set on it, the Aqua Elite 360 V3 is a strong choice for a reasonable price. Just don't go expecting a lot of bling beyond those RGB fans. There are coolers with LCD screens out there, but you'll have to spend much more.

Thermalright has a lot of coolers in its product line, so choosing five products required us to establish some selection criteria. We first limited our choices to newer coolers readily available on Amazon with at least two professional reviews, one of which needed to be from an established tech or PC hardware outlet. We then made a subjective call, opting for a varied selection of products that would appeal to various users. Thus, we didn't just feature a bunch of big air coolers and AIOs, even if they would be the best performers outright. Instead, the goal was to create a list that offered value to all sorts of PC builders, from those seeking an affordable cooling upgrade for a low-power CPU — the Assassin Spirit 120 V2 Plus — to buyers who want the performance of an AIO.

As a final note, the prices we've listed are the Amazon prices as of September 2025. Thermalright's pricing has remained relatively consistent, with only minor differences, so we don't expect prices to fluctuate wildly. The Phantom Assassin 120, for example, launched in 2023 at around $43, with the price only dropping by about $5 or so in the years since. That said, we also can't guarantee that they won't change significantly, either.