Design and Functionality

ASUS Royal Knight cooler boasts very original looks and is definitely no clone of any model we know:

It measures 131 x 140 x 138 mm and weighs 790 g. It is designed with six copper heatpipes 6mm in diameter. The heatpipes lead in different directions from the base of the cooler: four heatpipes on the sides go one way and the two central ones - in the opposite way.

They used “hot piercing” method to set 37 copper plates onto these heatpipes. Each plate is ~0.2 mm thin and they are spaced out at ~3.0 mm from one another:

There is a plastic frame on top of the heatsink that holds a 120-mm fan on an aluminum retention stand:

You can easily remove the fan, so replacing it in case of failure or with a more powerful solution shouldn’t be a problem.

The copper base plate has special grooves for the heatpipes:

These grooves increase the contact surface area and hence improve the heat transfer. For the sake of the same improvements they also soldered the heatpipes to the base instead of using thermal glue, which many other makers use in their cooling systems.

The cooler base is finished quite nicely. Although you can clearly see the machine marks, you don’t really feel them to the touch.

The base surface is impeccably even. The thermal paste imprints on the glass surface and CPU heat-spreader turned out perfect.

Semi-transparent 7-blade fan measures 120 x 120 x 25 mm and is manufactured by EverFlow Company:

The fan model T121225SL is built with a slide bearing. The fan rotation speed is controlled with pulse-width modulation (PWM) method in the interval from ~800 to ~1,300 (±10 %) RPM creating maximum 22 dBA of noise. Unfortunately, the airflow parameter is unknown. The fan features white LED highlighting. We didn’t detect any crackle of the fan motor in the entire rotation speed range.