My favorite budget CPU cooler just got a big update, boosting its cooling performance

The Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE has established itself as the go-to recommendation CPU cooler for anyone building a budget gaming PC. Thanks to its combination of great cooling capacity, reasonably quiet operation, and rock bottom price, it's a great choice, even for surprisingly powerful CPUs. Now, it's back for its third iteration, with the new Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE V3 adding slimmer but faster-spinning fans and a tweaked fin design.

It's not the most revolutionary update to the best budget CPU cooler, but it should mean Thermalright's stalwart remains a solid choice for years to come.

You can read about why the Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE is so revered in our Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE review. In it, I show that this cooler can comfortably contain the heat output of what was at the time the best gaming CPU around, the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, all while remaining decently quiet. It'll even cope with more powerful CPUs too, though I wouldn't recommend it for a chip with more than 12 cores.

Back to the new model, and Thermalright hasn't made any particularly bold claims about it, or indeed given it much fanfare at all. However, it does highlight new fans and an improved fin-stack pattern for its two heatsinks.

Its pair of 120mm fans have  been changed from the 28mm-thick TL-C12C-X28 of the V2 cooler to the 25mm TL-P12 of the V3. These use fluid dynamic bearings, have four-pin PWM connections for easy speed control, and they can spin at up to 2,000 RPM. This is a slight increase over the 1,850RPM of the previous fans, which results in an improved 2.63mm H2O or static pressure (compared to 2.21mm H₂O before). However, total airflow is actually lower (70.84CFM vs 88.89CFM), despite a slight increase in noise (29.8dBA vs 29.5dBA).

We won't know if these improvements were really worth it until testing the new cooler, but it has the potential to allow this cooler to cope a little better when cooling more powerful CPUs. Thermalright hasn't provided a peak thermal power rating for the cooler.

The Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE is compatible with AMD AM4/AM5 and Intel LGA 1851/1700/1150/1151/1200 CPUs and is available now from the likes of Amazon (link here) for the same $37 as the V2.