Deepcool Gamerstorm Fryzen review: A whole lot of hot air

Just in time for a whole new generation of AMD Ryzen processors, Deepcool has launched the Fryzen air cooler, which ignores the usual platform-agnosticism of third-party coolers to cater specifically for AMD sockets.

Deepcool Gamerstorm Fryzen review: Design

In fact, it’s as friendly towards the enthusiast Threadripper series of chips as much as it is the mainstream Ryzens, if not even more so. The contact plate is wider than usual, to fully cover the enlarged heat spreaders of Threadripper chips, and all the mounting kit you need for the TR4 socket is included alongside the AM4 socket parts. Often, coolers will claim to support TR4, but make you order a separate mounting kit for it.

Otherwise, the Fryzen presents a familiar air cooler setup. There’s a single 120mm intake fan that’s clipped – extremely securely – on to the radiator fin stack, with six nickel-plated heat pipes running from top to bottom on both sides. There are some neat touches, however: we like how the fan is integrated into a slightly chunky shroud, which extends over the top of the radiator to hide some of its more unsightly aspects. There are also channels cut into the radiator fins to allow for a screwdriver to easily access the tension screws during installation.

Deepcool Gamerstorm Fryzen review: Performance

On that note, setup is a breeze, especially for TR4 sockets: all you have to do is apply thermal paste to the processor (the Fryzen doesn’t have this pre-applied, but a tube of paste is included), screw in four standoffs, affix a couple of mounting brackets to them, then use those tension screws to secure the cooler on top.

For AM4 sockets, the process is a little more involved, although at least part of this includes ditching the default cooler mounts that AMD uses for its heinous clip-on system. Once those are uninstalled, it’s a matter of using the mounting plate to slide longer standoffs through the now-empty holes in the motherboard, before essentially performing the same steps as the TR4 socket requires.

From there, you can simply connect to the motherboard’s 4-pin CPU fan connector to get things going, but the Fryzen also has addressable RGB lighting support: the central ‘X’ shape on the fan shroud is lined with lighting strips. Compared to a lot of AIO watercoolers we’ve tested, setting this up is straightforward, too: there are a few extra cables involved, but they’re thin enough for easy tidying, and the inline controller is small enough to tuck away easily.

We usually test coolers with an Intel Core i7-4771K, which obviously isn’t an option here, so we installed the Fryzen over the new Ryzen 7 3700X. Unfortunately, it didn’t have the most auspicious of starts: at stock speeds, we recorded an idle core temperature of 41°C. That’s 2°C hotter than with the Noctua NH-U12S, a cooler that’s been around since the first Ryzen chips launched in 2017.

The Fryzen’s load temperature range of 72-73°C is at least on equal footing with the NH-U12S, but its peak of 81°C is surprisingly higher than the older cooler’s 76°C maximum. This is in spite of the Fryzen having a chunkier radiator and more heatpipes, which should help disperse heat more effectively.

Further complicating matters is that the Fryzen performed much better, comparatively speaking, with the Ryzen 7 3700X overclocked to 4.2GHz. The idle temperature was left unchanged at 41°C, and although load temperatures rose to 80-81°C, both idle and load temperatures were now dead even with those of the NH-U12S. This time, however, the Fryzen managed to keep a much lower peak temperature – 82°C – than the NH-U12S’s 89°C.

Deepcool Gamerstorm Fryzen review: Verdict

The Fryzen therefore meets expectations for a Ryzen cooler, even if it doesn’t particularly exceed them. £80 is a decent price for a TR4-capable air cooler, too.

That said, it’s also more expensive than both the Noctua NH-U12S (which was made for the AM4 socket) and its TR4 variant model, the NH-U12S TR4-SP3. These don’t have the same good looks or addressable RGB lighting, but they’ll keep chips cool just as well. At default fan speeds, the Fryzen tends to run significantly louder than the NH-U12S as well; if you’re not overclocking, we’d even recommend using software or a fan controller to slow it down.

Alternatively, you could just save yourself the bother – and £20 – and get one of the Noctua coolers instead. Outside of extra visual flair and a single better result in our overclocked CPU testing, there’s not much that makes the Fryzen worth buying over those models. This is a respectable cooler, but never acts like a truly great one.