Introduction

The very first watercooling product review on TechPowerUp was of a radiator in January 2017, and since then, I have covered other aspects in this extensive field—pumps, water blocks, reservoirs, fans, and so on. Showing exactly how stagnant the radiator market has been is the fact that this is only the second radiator review after so many months, and if there ever was a category that physics had proven to be a great equalizer for, this is it. There is very little to innovate and develop, but that has not stopped companies from trying. Some, such as Alphacool and Thermaltake, are going the route of adding lighting to the sides of radiators. Others, including XSPC, decided to engineer something to satisfy a growing niche. In particular, thinner profile radiators have never been more attractive than now with people wanting to build small, portable PCs that are still watercooled for customization and noise prioritization. Today, we see what XSPC's new offering is, and thanks again to them for providing a review sample.


The XSPC TX thin profile radiator series comes in 120, 240, 360, and 480 (120 mm fans) sizes, and we take a look at the TX360 with support for three 120 mm fans in this review. As the name also suggests, the unique selling point here is the extremely low profile of this radiator as it measures in at all of 20.5 mm. As seen above, this makes the radiator thinner than a standard 25 mm thick fan even, which allows for a working solution of a single fan set and radiator at just 45.5 mm in total—less than what a lot of radiators today measure in at by themselves. This begs the question of how much this extreme profile reduction impacts performance, and we will answer that question and more in this review as we begin with a look at the specifications below.

Specifications