SilverStone Permafrost PF360 ARGB Review

Introduction

By using 3 of their Air Blazer 120R fans, Silverstone's Permafrost PF360 ARGB promises to deliver top-of-the-line performance while simultaneously looking clean and esthetically pleasing thanks to its RGB paired with the beautiful little Snowflake logo! Let's see if their ideas turned out as they hoped!

What's in the Box?

As expected from SilverStone, their PF360mm AIO comes in a sturdy packaging featuring some imagery paired with a bit of specs and short feature introductions. Once every object is removed from the box, we will be left with the following items:

• PF360 AIO/Rad
• 3x AirBlazer 120R Fans
• 1-3 PWM splitter
• 1-4 ARGB Splitter
• ARGB Controller
• Installation Hardware Intel
• Installation Hardware AMD
• Thermal Paste
• 4-pin to Power Adapter

Down below you will also find a short spec summary:

Compatibility

As the PF360 is still being updated to this day, the compatibility list not only includes older sockets, but also the newest ones that are relative right now.

Down below you will find a full compatibility list:

Individual Components

Waterblock

As it's usually the case for AIOs, the heart of everything lies within the Waterblock. Hidden behind a beautiful RGB-powered SilverStone logo hides their pump spinning at up to 3400RPM.

Controllable over Voltage control, or directly full-powerable by using the 4-pin to Molex adapter.

At the bottom of it all lies a full-copper base suitably sized for today's CPU sizes.

Although we might not have expected it to such a degree, we became huge fans of the water block design. The combination of the SilverStone logo paired with 3 octagonal lines around the block looks stunning and is compatible with a lot of design themes.

Additionally, although probably slightly intentional, the usage of a Snowflake logo on top of cooling equipment makes for a great joke.

Radiator

The radiator used on the PF360 is pretty much as standard as you it can get in the 360mm AIO world. 27mm thick with 400mm long tubes adjustable at the water block. Nothing to add here.

Fan

When we initially unboxed the Fans, they seemed slightly 'low' quality. As far as our experience goes, the thinner the fan blades are, the less performance you can expect as this will then probably not be the only spot at which the manufacturer tried to save some money. 

For the Air Blazer 120R however, we needed to re-adjust our expectations.

Spinning at 2200RPM whilst pushing 94CFM at 3.54mm/H2O and controllable over PWM, there is nothing that this fan is not able to do. Additionally, the enormous amount of Air pressure that the 120R's are able to create is perfectly suited for heavy Radiator usages.

The only aspect that we did not particularly enjoy with the Air Blazers is their RGB. As quite often nowadays, the RGB is committed from the central area of the fan and then spread across the semi-transparent wings.

On the Air Blazers, however, we found that the light emitted was not particularly strong, resulting in light not reaching the outer end of the border. 

Appearance

The Permafrost PF360 is a bit of a mixed bag for us. On one hand, we believe that the fans could definitely get some upgraded LEDs for the light to reach the outer end.

On the other hand, however, the design of the SilverStone logo on top of the water block looks simply stunning and we completely fell in love with how clean this looked.

Ignoring the RGB section of this review for a minute, the rest of the AIO looks pretty much how you would expect for a 360mm AIO. A Big radiator and 3 fans. 

Benchmark

We tested the PF360 on top of our usual test setup.

While cooling down a 3900x, the PF360 managed to keep the CPU at 46°C above ambient under full load.

This places the PF360 on the same level as the Xilence LiQuRizer LQ360 and Arctic Liquid Freezer 360 ARGB, a very good result.

On the Noise-to-Performance graph, the PF360 managed to double down on its performance compared to the LiQuRizer 360. Performing almost completely identical, these two AIOs only differ in their design.

Compared to the Arctic Freezer 360 ARGB, the PF360 fell a tick behind, but not significantly enough to call it definitely outside the margin of error.

Conclusion

All in all, SilverStone's Permafrost PF360 is a great product. Performance-wise it managed to compete with the very best and even stood a chance against Arctic's monstrous (and a lot thicker) Liquid Freezer 360 ARGB.

But while doing so it managed to keep the price as low as Xilence's non-RGB LiQuRizer 360. This then means that the PF360 turns out to be the best performing RGB infused 360mm AIO if you favor a good price-to-performance ratio.

But also on the Noise-To-Performance front did the FP360 manage to score some points. Keeping up with the very best out of our 360mm coolers, there was nothing negative to say about SilverStone's bigger AIO.

The only problematic topic for us turned out to be the RGB implementation. On one hand, we absolutely love how the water block looks. The clean and straight lines paired with the SilverStone logo look both stunning and strong.

The Fans on the other end are kind of -meh. Unfortunately, we found that the light does not shine bright enough to make it to the end of the fan, leaving a white outer frame that doesn't look very esthetically pleasing.

However, in the end, we always favor performance over looks. And in this case, the PF360 managed to score every possible point, (and half the points for looks). Therefore, we can absolutely recommend the Silverstone PF360 for every use case involving any consumer-grade CPU.