I received a package from DeepCool containing their new Single tower Air Cooler, the DeepCool AK700 VC. As we have previously reviewed the Assassin IV VC, the company started to strategically apply their vapor chamber design for their air cooler’s CPU contact surface. And if you remember their older products, the AK400 and AK500, they essentially combined it into one setup. The main difference against the two older products is the application of a vapor chamber and seven heat pipes, and a more advanced fan (a newer iteration of their FT12 series of chassis fan).
Table of Contents
AK700 VC Design and Package
The AK700 VC comes in a carton box already familiar to us; foam inserts for the air cooler, a flip top carton box for the accessories. The package consists of the back mounting plate with AMD and Intel brackets. It also has the applicable spacers, a stainless-steel L shaped screwdriver and no thermal paste. The cooler came with thermal paste pre-applied. In our tests later, this is replaced with the standard MX-4 Thermal Paste by Arctic to keep test steps similar to other
Mounting Hardware
Let’s compare the mounting accessories. Technically they’re similar to the release version of the AK620 G2 NYX we reviewed before, therefore being interchangeable, like the rest of the AK/AG/Assassin IV coolers from DeepCool. But the AK620 G2 NYX I reviewed came with a pre-release version of the mounting brackets and spacers, which weren’t user friendly as the spacers are just plastic spacers; the AK700 VC we’re reviewing has screw on spacers which aids in preventing the back mounting plate from falling off the motherboard.
The mounting bracket for Intel has a noticeable difference from what I had with the AK620 G2. The length of the thread jutting out of the bracket is noticeably longer, which means contact with the cooler will be made earlier before the cooler’s CPU plate meets the CPU’s IHS. No more accidental contact of the IHS and cooler before tightening its screws.
Cooler Design
For the design of the AK700 VC, the bottom plate features a big contact patch for the CPU, along with the familiar pattern of the vapor chamber as we’ve seen with the Assassin IV VC. The Vapor Chamber itself is a second-generation design with expanded CPU contact surface, giving a more efficient way to get heat off of the CPU. The cooler itself is power coated in black giving it a premium touch and further separating the AK series with their budget AG series.
When compared with the AK620 G2 it roughly has the same stack of fins, and when stitched together would have similar width. But unlike the dual tower cooler, it only has one fan. By all accounts it should perform similar to a dual tower air cooler, right? The performance test will reveal the answer.
Since this is a single tower design, the mounting screws are positioned horizontally to the motherboard. Well, you’ll say, there’s that top cover on the backside screw, how do I screw that in? The AK700 VC has a magnetic top cover that can be easily removed to reveal two holes for the screwdriver to fit in. The left most would be for the mounting screw, while the central one is for adjusting the cooler’s position to the CPU vertically, like that of the AK620 G2. The right most screw is covered by the solo cooling fan.
The AK700 VC features a new FT style cooling fan which features CoreAlign Winding for efficiency and reduced resonance. Based on the specifications from DeepCool, this model has a very high CFM and pressure ratings, which should in theory, provide a performance similar to two fans. It sports a window for the hub (like the FT series) so we can view the motor and copper coils around it. When turned off, the window is fully opaque, and a set of LED white lights reveal the contents once turned on.
AK700 VC Performance Test
Installation for the AK700 VC’s easy and straight forward affair, I’ve swapped out the AK620 G2 brackets with the AK700 brackets to a horizontal orientation, and plugged the cooling fan first to the board, as it’s CPU Fan header’s recessed close to the VRM heatsink. Then I mounted the Air Cooler to the brackets. Given how long the bracket threads/connector are designed, I was able to easily mount the cooler on to the locking screw heads before ever making contact to the CPU.
The system used for benchmark is the Core i5 12600KF which I’ve been using for several years now and just about to retire. The entire test set up is inside a Deep Cool CH560 Digital Case for simulating an actual PC setup. It is running on a maximum 5.0GHz overclock with a fixed voltage setting and applied safeties (auto shutdown on overheat) and set power limits to PL2 for 180W and PL1 at 175W. Core Voltage is set to 1.29V as apparently the CPU’s 5.0GHz overclock favors this amount of voltage for a stable run.
The test was run at a constant 26° Celsius room temperature. The fan profile is the same as all the other tests before with 70° Celsius as the mark for full fan speed is applied. Also, instead of the stock thermal paste, I used Arctic MX-4 Thermal paste as the medium to put it in the same level as the other coolers.
The test result data gets the recorded duration of the run and filters out any data that was not part of the Cinebench run by removing recorded data that has less than 50% CPU usage. This is to remove the gap of HWInfo recording idle time before or after the run. This will give a tighter average temperature and power usage in the test. I have also compared it to a run using the DeepCool AK620 G2 NYX as a reference.
Whilst the AK620 G2 NYX Digital has a slightly lower average temperature of 95.4° Celsius, the more compact AK700 VC manages to almost match its performance on roughly close power draw on the CPU package for the Cinebench run. The AK700 VC offers an almost even performance against the bulkier dual tower cooler.
Running on idle or playing games didn’t stress the CPU too much, as games pass most of the load to the GPU kept CPU Temps at manageable range of 50-55° degrees on average.
Review Summary
The DeepCool AK700 VC is a single tower cooler, which binds the dual tower design into a single, wide design for compactness. As seen in the review, it’s a close performer to that of the dual tower cooler like the AK620 G2 NYX which doesn’t have the Vapor Chamber for its contact plate.
I surmise that the single tower’s fin stack has just about the same width of a dual tower fin stack combined and leveraging the efficient heat transfer properties of the 2nd generation Vapor Chamber really helps in pulling heat away from the CPU certainly does the job. The single tower configuration also makes the entire setup more compact too.
And while the single new FT Series fan has impressive specs, a push-pull configuration would have helped better in exhausting the heat from the fins quicker. Unfortunately, I don’t have a fan splitter, so I could’ve grabbed the fans off of the AK620 G2 (its fan splitter is integrated to the cooler). Looking at the reported 100% fan speed of the AK700 VC’s single cooling fan, it tops at 2760rpm. The AK620 G2 Nyx’s reported fan 100% fan speed is only at 1980rpm.
But we have to remind ourselves that there are two fans on the AK620 G2 Nyx on a push pull setup which in theory moves air much faster relieving the cooler’s fins stored heat. It translates that this model of fan is able to handle heat dispersion off of the cooler.
But in any case, the AK700 VC does work well, as normal daily use has kept temperatures to a range of 50° (running YT on browser, doing standard office tasks) to a max of 70° (when loading games). and the included fan’s design isn’t too noisy, which proves DeepCool has been doing its research in improving chassis fan design. I can definitely recommend the DeepCool AK700 VC for its simple, yet sleek aesthetic and ample cooling power. By the way, the DeepCool AK700 VC should be in the figure of around $69.99
Related Review: DeepCool AK620 G2 Digital NYX Review: 2nd Gen Stacks All the Good Things
