Asus Triton 85

Value and Conclusions

There’s no sugar coating the fact that the Triton 85 is a turkey. With very poor thermal performance, a tricky (and easy to break) mounting system and a high price, the advantage of silent cooling is completely lost in the swamp of negativity surrounding it's other flaws.

We feel a lot of the blame can be laid at the top down design of the heatsink, which interrupts the airflow through the case and blows hot air straight down onto the motherboard and surrounding components rather than towards the case exhaust where it needs to go.

This sort of design requires a decent sized side panel intake fan to operate at its best, directing a supply of cool air directly down onto the cooler, but this double fan effect can just increase the noise and it still doesn't help when removing the heat out the case.

But the real disappointment here is how much cheaper coolers crush the Triton 85 thermally, and although they are not silent, examples like the Akasa 465 offer a full 5 degree improvement in delta T value for half the cost.

Even the Triton 85’s position as a silent cooler is suspect with other coolers achieving vastly superior thermal performance, while delivering near silent noise levels, at the same cost as the Triton 85. After testing the cooler it seems bizarre that Asus even chose to include a 4 pin PWM connector; the fan is incredibly quiet at full speed, and at lower speeds the thermal performance only suffers even more.


It’s even difficult to justify as a media centre cooler, as although quiet it doesn’t have the ultra low profile to fit in many HTPC cases. The fact remains that even Asus' previous products were better than this.

Final Thoughts

Once again, we’ve seen the difficulty in striking the balance between cooling ability and noise levels when making a heatsink and even a company the size of Asus is not immune. In the past we've seen noisy coolers which perform well, and in this case, a silent cooler that performs poorly, but the ability to strike the balance between the two is still a feat very few manufacturers are able to accomplish.

With the Triton 85, not only has Asus sacrificed thermal performance for silence while still charging a high end price, the build quality has been lost in the equation too. The resulting product is vastly inferior to its competitors on every level, sadly making the Asus Triton 85 one to avoid.

• Features
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• -
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• 6/10

• Performance
• x
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• x
• x
• -
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• 4/10

• Build Quality
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• -
• -
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• 4/10

• Ease of Use
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
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• 5/10

• Value
• x
• x
• x
• -
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• 3/10

• Overall
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• -
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• 4/10

What do these scores mean?