Fractal Design Celsius S24 & S36 AIO Review

  

Conclusion

Both the S24 and the S36 performed admirably.  OK, so they’re not chart toppers, but they are well up there, and more importantly with regards to the hopefully now familiar holy trinity of cooler testing, not only do they do the job, but they are really very quiet, not just on the given figures from the company, but more importantly in our own subjective testing.  In simple terms, the S36 and the S24 are the quietest AIOs we’ve tested to date.  No doubt, this has had an impact on the performance, but even then they didn’t do too badly at all.  If we’re honest we thought the S36 might have presented us with a “The king is dead, Long live the King”, but sadly it was not to be.  Not far off though, but sadly not quite there.

So we’ve covered noise and performance, but what of last part of the holy trinity, aesthetics?  Well, the radiator itself is nothing special, and certainly doesn’t benefit from the anonymous stenciled serial number on its side.  The Pump though is a thing of beauty, with G1/4″ fittings offering expandability, with these mirrored in the radiators fittings.

When looking at performance, the only thing we really need to add in is that although we tested at the full 12v for all our tests, both these AIOs offer an integration by which the fans can be  plugged into the header on the radiator, and then either controlled via a lead to a suitable PWM motherboard header, or set to Auto and then if not told otherwise they favor low noise over all out performance.  As always, we test at 12v, but if you were to opt for either of these coolers we think you might be able to find a nice balance in there somewhere. We only tested at 12v so they fit in with the rest of our graph and if we are totally honest, we had a ridiculously short amount of time to be able to complete our review for the NDA due to some shipping issues and Im currently writing this at 2am! So youre now moaning to yourself about 12v testing, right? Ok. Now go back and look at the noise performance charts. Its not that big a deal when these things are SOOOO quiet!

Price wise theyre not too far away from the prices of their competitors, and both of these coolers offer decent performance with award winning noise levels. They have to get a huge tip of the cap for the fact they have a 360mm version for those of you that have a case big enough to accept it meaning you can run even lower fans speeds if you want too.  For this reason, we have no qualms at all in awarding the OC3D Silence award to both the S24 and the S36 coolers.

    

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