ALSEYE X240 Extreme Review

Introduction

ALSEYE's X12 Set of Fans was exceptional at the very least. Now, they decided to take an AIO, slap a couple of their drone Fans on top, and create an exceptionally looking AIO. Let's see how it turned out!

What's in the Box?

ALSEYE's X240 Extreme AIO comes in a surprisingly well-designed package. Despite the outside being as standard as it gets with the usual graphics, feature presentations, and minimalistic spec sheet, the inside got a couple of upgrades compared to what we're used to.

Instead of some carton keeping everything relatively in place, ALSEYE used a big chunk of styrofoam-like material with cutouts for each component, creating the securest packaging we've got so far.

Inside the box we can find the following components:

• ALSEYE X240 
• 2x ALSEYE X12 Fans 
• Fan/RGB Controller
• IR Remote
• Cables
• Mounting Hardware Intel/AMD

Below we also summarized the most important Specs:

Compatibility

In order to be usable on as many CPUs as possible, ALSEYE made sure to include a fairly large amount of older Sockets as well as the latest and greatest.

Below you will find the full compatibility list:

Individual Components

Waterblock/Pump

At the very center of ALSEYE's X240 Extreme sits something remarkable. The (by far) largest CPU Waterblock/Pump combo we have seen until now.

Being an enormous 90mm high, this behemoth of a block houses the pump with a big copper block underneath.

Taking a closer look at the Waterblock/Pump creates a mix of "wow" and "ooh". While the size is impressive, we quickly found the block to be almost completely empty. But we have to assume that the hollow space had to be used in a sound damping way as the pump was completely unhearable during all of our benchmarks and overall tests. 

Tubes

Something we were quite negatively surprised with is the tube length. With 300mm length, we found the FEP Sleeved tubes to be ridiculously short for a 240mm AIO.

Radiator

The heat dissipation of the setup is being taken care of by a 240mm long 27mm thick radiator. 

Fan

Just like the Waterblock/Pump, the Fans used on the X240 Extreme are exceptional at the very least. ALSEYE used a pair of their X12 Fans, but instead of just using the ones already produced, they decided to make them stronger and let them spin at up to 1600RPM.

This improvement in speed results in a higher cooling performance with 56.2CFM at 1.97mm/H2O.

A set of ALSEYE X12 fans comes with a dedicated controller. This controller is meant to control the Fan speed as well as the color of every LED.

Connecting each component is a fairly easy process.

The Controller is powered by SATA by using the included proprietary-to-SATA adapter. The Fans have to be connected by using the 3x Proprietary-to-Proprietary connectors, with the bigger end going into the controller and the smaller one into one of each Fans legs.

Already at this point, we can fully use the set by using the included IR Remote. We can set the Fan speed with the Fan Speed + and - Buttons, and set a specific RGB Color, or RGB Mode.

Fortunately, the controller doesn't limit us to IR Remote usage. The last cable inside the box is a Controller cable which ends in a 4-Pin PWM and 3-Pin ARGB connector. Using this cable allows us to connect the set to a Motherboard, and control the Fan Speed and color using our Motherboards software.

Installing the Fans onto a radiator is also slightly different than normal.

We need to remove the small caps on the upper side of each fan's leg and place one of the included Radiator screws inside. After mounting the Fan on a radiator, we can proceed by putting the cap back on, hiding the screw, and leaving us with a clean look.

Appearance

During the whole review, we used the adjective "exceptional" numerous times. And we stand by that.

Until now we have not seen an AIO with such an exceptional (again) look. If you like it or not will, of course, depend on your personal preferences and needs. But there is no way of denying that it looks different.

Each component got a couple of RGB stripes and an ALSEYE logo in the center. But it does not matter how much RGB is packed in here as it is actually the "space-craft" look, which always drew our attention.

And it is this level of "being different" that we admired.

Benchmark

Ignoring the look, being different is just not enough. Therefore we installed the X240 Extreme on our Testbench with a Ryzen 3900x at 4.3ghz and 1.4vCore and tried it out.

At 100% Fan speed, we found that the X240 Extreme managed to keep the 3900x 53°C above ambient, making it perform significantly better than ALSEYE's own H240, but still outperformed by Arctics's 120mm Liquid Freezer.

Slowly lowering the Fan speed in 10% increments revealed that the X240's advantage stay the same compared to the H240, but not compared to an Azza Blizzard 240 which starts to overtake underneath 70% Fan speed.

Normalizing these numbers by Noise revealed that the X240 outperforms the H240 in every category, but the Azza Blizzard 240 still wins in terms of noise-to-performance.

Unfortunately, as soon as we add a higher-class AIO like a NZXT Kraken X53 or Cooler Master ML240, the X240 is completely outrun in every category.

While performing our benchmarks, we always repeat the 100% PWM with one and two sets of Arctic P12's in case the included Fans are the reason the AIO performs badly. This is exactly such a case.

While letting the X240 be cooled by Arctic P12's, we found the X240 to outperform every other 240mm AIO as well as Azza's 360mm cooler at 49°C. While using 4x P12's in a push-pull config, the x240 got down to 48°C, almost competing with our big and good performing 360mm models.

After investigating these results, we found there to be a significant amount of air which is being pushed to the sides of the radiator by the fans. We are assuming that this happens because of the missing outer fan frame coming from the exceptional design.

But, no matter if this is true or not, we are also shocked by the amount of performance that the radiator and pump were able to produce in combination with our P12's.

Conclusion

Looking back at the complete review, it was a real roller-coaster ride.

The design and overall look of the X240 Extreme as a whole is exceptional to say the very least. But design is a personal thing so we will leave this up to you.

The roller-coaster part was the performance.

Out-of-the-box, the ALSEYE X240 performs like an average AIO like any other out there. But as soon as you change up the fans, it becomes an extremely well-performing cooling monster, outperforming every other 240mm AIO we have seen so far.

This being said, we also want to note that the 300mm tube length is absolutely not enough nowadays, especially for a 240mm AIO.

Overall, if you are planning a themed build involving the X240, we do think that you are doing no wrong. But we highly recommend doing a slight modification. As the X12 Fan's design only allows the Fans to be installed in one direction, we would suggest mounting a pair of P12's on the other side of the radiator. As our benchmarks showed, this minor modification greatly improves the X240's performance and creates one of the best 240mm AIO we've seen.