ASRock Challenger 360 Digital CPU Cooler Review

Bursting onto the scene back in March with its high-end Phantom Gaming 360 LCD was motherboard-maker ASRock’s opening volley: At less than half the price, its Challenger 360 LCD goes for the heart of the closed-loop CPU cooling market. Can this $90 kit keep up with its high-priced rivals with cut-rate competitors nipping at its heels?

That Price! But How???

Buyers thinking about how handy it might be to use the top of a  water pump to display things like CPU frequency, temperature and fan speed need not splurge on a 480×480 pixel LCD like the one found on ASRock’s highest-priced model, because a cheaper tech has been available to normal buyers for as long as PCs have been on our desks: The Challenger 360 Digital does its magic using a broad enough variety of LED segments that it can switch between displaying any of those three stats on its main (center) section.

And The Rest?

You knew that a cooler this large would be more than just a pretty face, but you’ll have to jump down a few paragraphs to get to its test results: This is where we’ll point to the 3x120mm radiator arriving assembled with three ARGB cooling fans and packed with an installation guide, thermal paste, tube spacer clips, a pair of AMD socket AM5/AM4 brackets with AMD-specific standoffs, a pair of LGA 1851/1700 brackets with Intel-specific standoffs, an Intel socket support plate and a set of radiator installation screws.

The head unit (pump/water block combo) might be topped with an LCD display, but its bottom still has a classic copper coldplate to interface a CPU’s integrated heat spreader (IHS). A ring cast into the housing above it is designed to hold the above-mentioned retention brackets.

The AMD-pattern retention brackets are designed to fit only with the narrow side above and below the socket, so that motherboards with sockets turned the other way will force the head unit to fit with its digital display reading bottom-to-top. What appeared to be captured spring screws in prior photos are shown here to be tube nuts…still captured to the bracket…and still with springs captured beneath their heads.

Each of the Challenger 360 Digital’s fans connects to the next via short proprietary cables, so that users who break a fan will either need to replace all three or find a source for the identical part. This could become somewhat important as the unit ages, since ASRock says its six-year warranty applies only to the unit’s “AIO Cooler Module”: External parts like the fans and display are only warranted for two years.

One end of that fan chain breaks out into industry standard PWM fan and ARGB cables, the latter fitted with a pass-through output for the pump’s cable set. The pump is also powered by a PWM cable and lighted via an ARGB input, but it adds a USB 2.0 input for data transfer to its digital display. Only four of the USB plug’s nine pins are connected to the digital display, so that builders who own a splitter that’s designed to break out the other five pins can use it.

All of these inputs are designed to fit standard motherboard headers.

Installing The Challenger 360 Digital

AMD motherboards arrive factory equipped with a clip-on cooler bracket screwed down to threaded holes in an attached backplate, so that adapting the Challenger 360 Digital’s mounting brackets requires only removing the factory clip bracket and replacing its screws with standoffs. Since Intel’s LGA 1851 and 1700 don’t include that kind of support plate, the on included in Challenger 360 Digital’s installation kit must be added to the backs of those motherboards.

We first added a few dots of thermal compound to the top of our CPU, then slipped the AMD brackets into to the grooves above the head unit’s cold plate, and finally threaded its spring-loaded tube nuts onto the installed AMD standoffs. The springs applied the clamping force shoving its coldplate tightly against our CPU’s heat spreader.

With our installation complete we found that the Challenger 360 Digital’s display didn’t do anything until we downloaded and installed its driver. As the driver only instructs the OS on sending data to its digital display, the rest of the cooler functioned normally both with and without that driver.

Here’s how normal function appears with the driver installed.

Testing The Challenger 360 Digital

We’ll compare the Challenger 360 Digital to our five most recently evaluated “360mm” format closed-loop coolers using the following hardware:

System Configuration
Case	Thermaltake Ceres 500 TG ARGB
CPU	AMD Ryzen 9 7900X: 12 cores/ 24 threads, 64MB L3 Cache O/C to 5.00 GHz at 1.25 V Core
Motherboard	ASRock B650E PG Riptide WiFi, BIOS 1.18
RAM	Sabrent Rocket SB-DR5U-32GX2 64GB DDR5-4800
System Drive	HP SSD FX900 M.2 1TB NVMe SSD

Results

We’re not certain how the Challenger 360 Digital performed better than other coolers of similar size in our CPU test, we can only see that it did so by a fraction of a degree. Meanwhile, it fell several degrees behind competitors in voltage regulator temperature, which is really just a measure of how well its wasted airflow cool a part of the board that is designed to use that waste.

We’re likewise unsure of how the Challenger 360 Digital beat four of its rivals in our noise measurement, we merely read the meter.

Given all that data, the Challenger 360 Digital took first place in CPU cooling-to-noise but fell to fifth in VR MOS cooling-to-noise comparisons.

Now if anything were to prevent the Challenger 360 Digital from winning a value award, it could only be that one of the losing coolers was also far cheaper. And that’s true: The Sama L70 started out with an $80 MSRP but recently fell to a mere $50, and we can’t logically justify spending $40 more just to get a limited-function digital display atop our build’s water pump.

The again, aesthetic preferences occasionally override our strictest logic: We like having these kinds of features in some of our builds and have yet to test any display-topped cooler that costs less than the well-performing Challenger 360 Digital.

ASRock Challenger 360 Digital (90-ACLA36-BAAGA6)
Pros:	Cons:
Top CPU cooling Stylish status display Cheapest display-topped cooler we’ve tested	Short warranty on non-core parts (fans and display)
The Verdict:
The Challenger 360 Digital brings us top-tier CPU cooling and a beautifully basic status display for a very nice price.