Why should AIO coolers get all the bling? Veteran PC cooling specialist Lamptron has just proved that the humble air cooler can look just as glitzy, with its latest model sporting a 6-inch screen. The Lamptron ST060 plants a full 1,920 x 1,080 display on top of your CPU socket, giving you loads more flexibility than the usual little screens you see on the pump blocks of AIO coolers.
Even the best CPU cooler options found in the air cooler world rarely offer much in the way of glamor. You might get a classy black or silver finish, but the focus is usually very much on engineering the heatpipes, fin stacks, and fans to offer the very best CPU cooling possible without making a horrible noise.
Lamptron has turned that idea on its head by putting a large screen on top of a hefty cooler, and the company claims it’s capable of some serious cooling power. With a pair of 120mm fans under the screen, as well as six 6mm heatpipes and a dense double-tower heatsink, Lamptron claims the ST060 can shift up to 260W of thermal energy from a CPU. That would enable it to even keep the notoriously hot-running Intel Core i9-14900K under control, as well as the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X.
There’s no doubt that the big appeal of this cooler, though, is the screen. We’ve seen the occasional temperature monitor on top of an air cooler, from companies including DeepCool and Zalman, but we’ve never seen a full screen before. According to the cooler’s European retailer, CaseKing, where this cooler has just appeared for sale, you can use this screen to display video, or you can use it to display data from your motherboard’s sensors.
Lamptron recommends using AIDA64 for the latter, which will require a subscription, but you can get a free 30-day trial. You’ll need to do some careful cable routing, though. A number of cables are included in the box, showing that the screen needs to be hooked up to a USB Type-A connection for data and an HDMI output for video. Meanwhile, all the major CPU sockets are supported for both Intel and AMD processors, including AM4 and AM5, as well as LGA1700, LGA115x, and LGA1200.
In case you haven’t heard of Lamptron before, I remember this company from many years ago, when it had a big presence in the market for fan controllers and screens that slotted into 5.25-inch drive bays. It still makes these products now, along with various fans and cables, but I certainly wasn’t expecting to see Lamptron’s name in the headlines for innovative CPU cooler design this year.
Two versions have appeared for sale online – one with black fans and a black heatsink, and one with ARGB fans and a silver heatsink. They’re very far from cheap, though, with both options costing over $300. Considering you can buy a superb dual-tower cooler such as the Noctua NH-D15 or Corsair A115 for $99, that’s a lot of money for a small screen on top of your CPU cooler.
You could also buy a decent AIO cooler with a screen for that kind of price, even if it isn’t a 6-inch 1080p display. If you think $300 is a bit much for an air cooler (and you’d be right), check out our best AIO cooler guide for some other options that still have plenty of cooling power.