It’s not easy to stand out in the overcrowded AIO CPU cooler market, however many RGB LEDs you throw at your fans, but Hyte managed to stop us on our tracks at CES 2024 with this gloriously over-the-top liquid cooler. The Hyte THICC Q60 not only has a 52mm-thick radiator, two pumps, and daisy-chainable fans, but it also has a massive 5-inch screen perching on top of the waterblock unit.
Hyte modestly says that the aptly named THICC Q60 “this 240 will destroy any 360 AIO from our competition,” which is fighting talk, and would make the cooler a very strong contender for our best AIO cooler guide if it lives up to the company’s claims. The idea is that this Hyte cooler’s chunky radiator and fans will still fit in a lot of cases that only have room for a 240mm cooler, but will still have enough cooling power to tame the latest top-end CPUs, such as the Intel Core i9-14900K.
It’s the screen that steals the show, though. We’ve seen a lot of AIO coolers with displays on the waterblock unit, but the THICC Q60’s screen is like having a second monitor on top of your CPU. It’s a 5-inch IPS model with a 720 x 1,280 resolution and 60Hz refresh rate, and a brightness rating of 300 nits. Forget just showing a custom animated GIF logo on your cooler, you could basically play a movie inside your PC case now.
Not only that, but there’s also a 42-pixel qRGB array underneath the screen, enabling you to spread your chosen RGB lighting and effects over the rest of your system’s innards. All of this is controllable through Hyte’s Nexus software. Meanwhile, the cooling system has not one but two pumps for circulating coolant around the loop, and these are located in a section of the radiator unit.
It all looks good on paper, but I have a few words of warning about using thick radiators from my experience with custom water-cooling systems. The THICC Q60’s 54mm radiator is twice as thick as the usual 27mm radiators found on AIO coolers, such as the Corsair H100 models.
This does indeed give you a lot more room to spread heat, but a thick radiator also requires more airflow than a usual radiator in order to push enough air through the extra-large radiator’s fins and properly keep the coolant in check. This will be helped by the 32mm-thick fans provided with the THICC Q60, which have a massive amount of static pressure, but these in turn make the Q60 a massive beast to accommodate in your PC.
If you plan to mount the radiator in the roof of your case, a thick radiator will also hang down prominently over your motherboard in a lot of cases, so you’ll want to measure up your case’s interior to work out where you’re going to put that screen (which is thankfully movable), and that the thick radiator and fans won’t clash with your memory modules.
This much cooling power and bling naturally doesn’t come cheap, though. The Hyte THICC Q60 price is $299, and is available to pre-order now, with units shipping on Thursday, February 15, 2024.
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