Published: July 29, 2021 | Source: ASUS | Author: Tom Logan

ASUS ROG Ryujin II 360 AIO Cooler Review

Conclusion

Any time a new ROG product arrives in the office we take a moment to appreciate how relentless the quality of their hardware is. It might seem an obvious thing to say, and there certainly is a price to pay for it, but given how much hardware comes through our hallowed halls we are highly experienced in spotting areas that aren’t up to par. With ASUS ROG stuff though that is almost never an issue. Regardless of what it is, if it has a ROG logo on it then you’ve little to complain about on the hardware side of things.

The Ryujin II is no exception to this rule. The radiator is very much on a level with all the other high end AIOs we have looked at. It’s hefty with a high fin density and a thick, lustrous finish that gives you a good indication of what is to come. The connectors and cabling are probably the one area that we all fear, particularly if you’re combining electronics with liquid, and it’s reassuring to see the high quality of the components chosen in these areas in particular. This attention to detail carries on to the fans. Many companies use generic fans with their own stickers on them, but ASUS have instead cut out the middle man and gone straight to the source of some of the finest fans on the market, Noctua, and utilised their 2000 RPM Industrial PPC fans. These are spectacular, shifting huge volumes of air but doing so without, ahem, huge volume of noise.

You can’t go too far without mentioning the pump though. The 7th Gen Asetek pump has found a home in all the high end AIOs on the market thanks to its ceramic bearings and shafts and broad RPM range. It’s a robust, battle-tested pump and the perfect choice for the Ryujin II. After all, if you’re placing a screen on top of it and charging this much you want the underlying hardware to be up to the task, which it definitely is. You only need to look at the three results in our graph on the previous page to know how good the Asetek/Noctua combo is at cooling one of the warmest processors around. With outstanding build quality, high cooling performance and the flash and flair of a customisable screen on top of the pump the hardware side of the ASUS ROG Ryujin II is beyond reproach.

ASUS one weakness is their software. Anyone suffering the AI Suite 3 constantly crashing with fan control server errors will know the pain of their poor support structure, or indeed anyone trying to use their LiveDASH, or getting the AURA Sync and Armory Crate working in harmony. For a company that chucks out class-leading hardware you’d have hoped that they’d employ competent software engineers too, but it’s a constant weakness. Such is the case with the Ryujin II. Remember how we bemoaned ASUS lack of CPU temperature or VRM temperature details in our motherboard reviews? Well the control for the fans on the Ryujin II isn’t taken from from the CPU itself but from a probe behind the CPU socket on the back of the motherboard. This means you always get a massive peak temperature spike before things warm up enough to kick the cooler into life. It’s unforgiveable. This isnt the first time we have mentioned it though so they clearly do not see it as a problem. You’re either forced to run a fixed RPM profile, or run a massive offset to counteract this sluggish response. Most annoyingly this is such a simple fix. Just give us a box in the software to tick where we can choose to use the CPU package, or perhaps pick a core, or all-core average, as the temperature to monitor. If youre just gaming / light user then it might not matter but then why would you be buying one of these in the first place? If youre a power user, overclocker, benchmarker, or even someone doing things like video rendering then knowing tabout the probe may help you realise you need to massively alter your fan curve to try and compensate for its delays and dimwitted response times.Â

We will keep our fingers crossed that this issue gets addressed but based on previous experience it wont. Its a shame though because in every other regard the ASUS ROG Ryujin II 360 is a spectacular AIO, with amazing build quality, high cooling capacity, and that ever-so-desirable screen on the pump. It wins our OC3D Aesthetics award. Now just fix which temperature the software monitors and it’ll be Ultimate-worthy.