Best CPU cooler in 2024 – picks for AIO, premium, and budget

To start us off, we’re looking at the Noctua NH-D15. Noctua is an Austrian company that takes pride in their over engineered cooling products. They became known for producing some good CPU fans, neigh, the best CPU fans on the market.

Although their two-tone beige and brown color scheme became infamous for its outdated looks, it didn’t stop these powerful, quiet fans from carving a niche in the market for Noctua. More recently, they’ve released more contemporary colors, like black and grey.

Noctua’s knowledge hasn’t only gone towards making more attractive products, however, as the NH-D15 proves that they’ve also learned a lot in the engineering department. In fact, it’s widely considered to be the most powerful air cooler on the market and is easily the best 1151 CPU cooler to cool Intel’s hottest processors.

The drawback? This thing is massive; it won’t fit into all cases. The dual tower design uses two fans and comes in at a towering 165mm in height. That said, it is designed to avoid blocking RAM slots and will offer 64mm of clearance for your memory, which is enough for most RAM modules.

When it comes to cooling, nothing beats water’s specific heat capacity and its flow rate makes it much better at cooling than air.

However, until recently, water cooling your computer was only an option for custom loop builders experimenting with their own setups. Thankfully, in the last several years many manufacturers have taken to making all in one, or AIO water coolers that have a pump, hoses, radiator, and fans all set up and ready to use.

NZXT has made the best liquid CPU cooler on the market with their Kraken AIO, which is easy to install. The pump is, subjectively, the best looking on the market and is a small round shape with customizable RGB lighting and an infinity mirror effect that looks great. However, the way the hoses come out of the water block can block some RAM slots on certain motherboards, which can be a hassle.

It is worth noting that what sockets you can put it on will depend on the size you get. The smallest 120 mm fan will only go on some Intel sockets, but as you go up in size the compatibility improves and begins to include more AMD sockets (if you click our link to the listing you’ll see they have a nice chart there for socket compatibility).

The Kraken can be outfitted with a 120mm, 140mm, 240mm, 280mm, or 360mm radiator giving you tons of options to get the best fit for your case and the most cooling possible. The fans make this cooler surprisingly noisy under heavy load for a water cooler, but under most normal CPU loads it’s actually spinning the fans so slowly that it is completely silent.

When planning a highly color coordinated PC build, it can be hard to find a high-end heatsink that matches the rest of your system. Luckily, be quiet! offers an awesome all black heat sink with its Dark Rock 4. This is the best heat sink for aesthetics.

The cooler uses a meticulously engineered arrangement of twelve densely arranged heat pipes to distribute heat into the heatsink fins efficiently. It also maximizes the usable area of the fins giving this nearly as much cooling power as the much larger NH-D15. This efficient design helps make this arguably the best air cooler for overclocking thanks to it’s sustained heat dissipation capacity.

Be quiet! lives up to their name with this heatsink, as it reaches a maximum noise level of only 21.9 dBA when under load. For most purposes, this means the fans are entirely silent, as most rooms have an ambient sound level that is higher than this. It’s also possible to mount a second fan to this heatsink with the included second mount for even greater cooling performance, but this will make it noisier depending on the fan you choose.

The Dark Rock coolers have always had a reputation for being incredibly difficult to install. The mounting brackets are awkward and have even been repeatedly redesigned by be quiet! to no effect. If you choose to use this in your system be prepared for a solid half hour of curse word slinging and knuckle busting.

If you’re looking for a budget-friendly CPU cooler that still offers solid performance, then the Hyper 212 Evo from Cooler Master is probably ideal for you. This cooler is the most affordable on our list by a significant margin but still offers enough performance to be suitable for gaming or other demanding tasks.

The way Cooler Master was able to achieve the cooling performance of the Hyper 212 while keeping the size and cost down is with their continuous direct contact heat pipe design. Most air coolers use a block of aluminum to absorb the CPU’s heat with heat pipes that run through the aluminum block to carry the heat up to the fins.

But, the Hyper 212 is designed with the heat pipes in direct contact with the surface of the processor rather than being embedded in an aluminum block, which allows for more efficient heat transfer. This design also makes it the best AM4 cooler thanks to its ability to make good contact with AMD’s wide CPU dies and transfer heat away from the numerous spread out cores.

This cooler can also be equipped with a second fan to further improve cooling performance. The included fan can get pretty loud when under load, but replacing it with a more silent fan, like one from Noctua, is always an option.

Any small form factor project comes with a number of challenges. Amongst them is cooling, especially if it has gaming grade hardware in it.

GPUs and CPUs can throw off tons of heat, rapidly increasing the temperature inside the small internal volume of the case. This compounds the problem and causes your GPU and CPU to run even hotter. You can quickly end up throttling your hardware, hurting performance or worse yet, damaging your hardware.

For those trying to solve the problem of cooling in a small form factor case, Noctua offers the NH-L12S. This tiny cooler features a unique design that puts the heat pipes and heat sink fin array in a horizontal orientation (rather than vertical like most). The fan is then mounted underneath this sideways looking heatsink in order to maximize space.

This design allows the NH-L12S to achieve very impressive cooling with a total height, including the fan, of only 70mm meaning it will fit in practically any case. This diminutive cooler is easily the best CPU cooler for gaming in a small form factor.