Montech Air Cooler 210 Review

Introduction

The Air 210 is Montechs first attempt on the CPU cooler market. With a black heatsink and an ARGB Fan, Montech is trying to deliver a high-performance cooler at a lower price. Let's see if they managed to deliver!

What's in the Box?

Once the Montech Air 210's packaging is opened, we will find a variety of items:

• Montech Air 210 Heatsink
• Montech Fan
• 4x Fan Clips
• Intel Installation Hardware
• AMD Installation Hardware
• ARGB Controller
• Thermal Paste
• Screwdriver

The additional Fan mounting clips included by Montech are a nice thing to see. Though we need to add that the Fan which is supposed to be used on this cooler is not available as a separately purchasable item. Therefore you will be able to use this cooler in a Push-Pull configuration, but you will need to use 1 or 2 alternative fans.

On the back of the box, Montech includes an extensive spec sheet list which we summarized down below:

Compatibility

In order to maximize compatibility and their potential user base, Montech made sure to make the Air compatible with the latest CPU generations as well as the older ones:

Individual Components

Fan

The Fan included with the Montech Air 210 is an unnamed in-house-made Fan capable of spinning at 1500RPM with 73 CFM and an unspecified amount of static pressure.

Hidden inside the center of the milky-acrylic Fan wings, Montech placed a couple of RGBs which are illuminating the complete inner section of the fan. 

Heatsink

The Air 210s heatsink comes in a black finish with a black protection block on top. The Block on top comes in a partially brushed aluminum finish with a discreet usage of the Montech logo.

Underneath the heatsink, Montech used 6 copper heat pipes with a copper block around them, theoretically capable of handling at least 210W TDP.

Installation

Intel

In order to install the Air 210 while using an Intel Chip, we need to make use of the provided Backplate. Here we need to place the Intel screws through one of the provided holes and keeping them in place with one of the provided plastic screw-holders.

After positioning the Backplate behind the motherboard, we can place the Spacers on the screws followed by the retention brackets and screw everything down with the thumbscrews.

From here we can position the cooler on top of the CPU and screw it down. One screw is immediately accessible on the side of the cooler, while the other one is accessible after removing one of the screws on the top plate. Please make sure to make use of the included screwdriver for this step.

AMD

The installation process on AMD's platform is just as easy.

After removing the pre-installed black retention brackets, we can position the included spacers on top and screw in the retention brackets with the AMD Screws.

From here we can position the cooler on top of the CPU and screw it down. One screw is immediately accessible on the side of the cooler, while the other one is accessible after removing one of the screws on the top plate. Please make sure to make use of the included screwdriver for this step.

Benchmark

We tested the Montech Air 210 on top of our usual bench table using our Ryzen 3900x locked at 4.2 GHz and 1.4vCore.

While letting the Air 210's Fan spin at 100% of it's 1500RPM speed, the cooler managed to keep the CPU at 87°C, placing it at the same spot as a BQ Pure Rock 2.

While lowering the Fan speed in 10% increments, the Air 210 manages to catch up with our other contestants, ending up with the same performance as a Akasa Soho H4 at less than 50% PWM.

While taking a look at the Noise-Performance ratio, we were able to observe that the 6 copper heat pipes and thick heatsink did not provide any significant benefit to the Air 210. No matter the Fan speed and thus omitted noise, the only contestant that Montech was able to beat with their Air Cooler 210 is the free- and included AMD Wraith Prism.

Conclusion

All in all, we are quite disappointed with the Air 210s performance.

Being significantly bigger than a Be Quiet! Pure Rock 2 in every dimension, we thought that this would end up to be a perfect comparison.

However, our Benchmarked showed that either the Heatsink or Fan or the combo of the two, does not work as we expected it to.

No matter the scenario, Fan speed, or Noise-level, the only CPU cooler in our list which was beaten by the Air 210 was the AMD Wrath prism.

Credit where credit is due, even if the performance was not as good as we hoped, the Montech Air 210 is still a highly rigid cooler, which comes in a nice looking black finish and clean design.

Unfortunately, the price flips the scale again. Being priced at around 59€ or 59$, the Air 210 is significantly more expensive than a Be Quiet Pure Rock two, leaving us no choice but to recommend you to have a look at other coolers if you are searching for the best price-to-performance ratio or any performance for that matter.