Looks like a nice enough standard tower cooler, though given the methodology of that 'review' (a single comparison, no data logging, no real workload control, all very off-the-cuff) I'd need to see something a bit more thorough to believe those numbers. It's a bog-standard 5-heatpipe tower cooler after all - it'll perform roughly the same as similar designs, as it's not bringing anything new to the table. That doesn't make it bad by any means, and that price is definitely nice. But it doesn't make sense for it to outperform an AIO unless there was a bad mount for the AIO, it was running at a too-low pump speed, or something similar. Still, for a budget cooler it looks great!
That being said, my sentiment for a while has been that if I didn't get into water cooling a few years back mostly by chance - I came across a $30 EK waterblock for my Fury X, and wanted to get rid of its whiny AIO; things snowballed from there - I would likely be going all air today. I couldn't do that in the Meshlicious, but after the expense and hassle of water cooling, air cooling does look mighty attractive, and there are good SFF cases that can still fit good air coolers, if at a slightly bigger footprint. I would definitely be deshrouding any air-cooled GPU though, as those tiny, cheap fans inevitably suck. I'm very happy with my current setup, and I'm particularly satisfied with getting QDCs in there so that it's actually serviceable, and the combination of size, performance and noise is unbeatable. But with the right case I could get decently close with air for a fraction of the price. Water is still the best, but it's a lot of hassle and very expensive even if you go with "budget" parts.
today its easy everythings one click away just add money.
