As indicated by a forum thread on Reddit several months ago, many AMD fans were bummed when AMD said it would only bundle its Wraith coolers with certain processors rather than sell them separately. There was even a request to partner with a cooling company to sell rebranded versions. That never happened, though AMD did casually mention that it's now making its top-of-the-line 140W Wraith Max cooler with programmable RGB lighting available for individual sale.
The suggested price is $59, which is on par with a high end-air cooler. In our review of Ryzen 3 yesterday, we saw similar overclocking performance between a lower end Wraith Stealth and liquid cooling. Results from the Wraith Max should be even better.
Wraith Max coolers will ship with the necessary hardware to install on AM4, AM3, and FM2 motherboards. If you're going with an AM4 setup, AMD says the Wraith Max is powerful enough to enable the extended frequency range (XFR) technology on its Ryzen 7 1800X, 1700X, and Ryzen 5 1600X while keep noise levels below 35 dBA. That's library level quietness, according to most noise level charts.
You can customize the RGB lighting on the Wraith Max using any of several lighting utilities, including ASRock's RGB LED tools, Asus Aura Sync, Biostar Vivid LED DJ, Gigabyte RGB Fusion, and MSI Mystic Light. AMD also offers lighting control software powered by Cooler Master, which you can download for free here.
We couldn't spot any stores offering the Wraith Max at the time of this writing, though with AMD saying it's "now available," it shouldn't be long before inventory starts to appear.
