Cooling Reviews Watercooling

AiO-Roundup and overview of all All-In-One compact water coolers for the CPU tested so far and outlook on what’s coming

If you take a look in the course of the articles I (Tim, not Igor!) published, you will quickly notice that my focus and the test-related feel-good corner here at igor’sLAB is on consumer cooling solutions and especially the AiO water cooling systems. For now. And not everyone can get their hands on an Erlkönig with unicorn rarity for testing, let alone afford it after the official release. And somebody has to take care of the radiators for normal mortals, so to speak the butter-and-bread stories. So me.

Up to now here, the following AiO tests from me have been published by IgorsLab with a uniform platform, which of course also make direct comparison possible:

  1. Noctua U12S chromax.black (Reference air cooler)
  2. Cool Master MasterLiquid ML240L RGB
  3. Cool Master MasterLiquid ML240L V2 RGB
  4. Xilence LiQuRizer LQ240RGB
  5. Alseye MAX M240-T
  6. EK Waterblocks EK-AIO 240 D-RGB
  7. Corsair H150i RGB PRO XT
  8. Fractal Design Celsius+ S36 Prism

A general overview with all coolers in direct comparison was (deliberately) missing up to now, but I’m happy to provide it now with this final article. The reason for this is, among other things, that in future cooler reviews some things will change or will improve. I upgraded my testbench to a Ryzen 5 3600 CPU, the old Asus B350-Plus was also retired. Voltage converters at a good 100°C without active cooling were not good for the board during the long stress tests.

So in the future the tested coolers will have to prove their ability against a modern chipset design, which is different from the easier to cool monolithic die of the Ryzen 1XXX / 2XXX and Intel CPUs. The following direct comparison of different coolers to each other also shows how important the addition of a further metric, the sound level, will be in the future. Coolers with fans, which are not only very high speed but also unpleasantly loud, can “brute-force” their way to the top of the comparison.

At this point I will improve in further reviews and add a comparison to other coolers with the same sound level in addition to the measured values of the volume (dBA). If it can be implemented, an audio recording of the sound characteristics will also be provided. Since the data are nevertheless interesting, I have plotted the 14400 measured data into the bar chart.

One last time the well-known hardware: A Ryzen 5 1600X has to be cooled at 4.00Ghz with 1.40V, in addition to 16GB DDR4 G.Skill RipJaws 4 RAM on an Asus Prime B350-Plus. The Asus RoG Strix GTX 1060 6GB only runs in zero-fan mode for image output and a BitFenix Whisper M 450W serves as power source. The whole thing is located in the Thermaltake Core P3 Open Benchtable. 

Comparison of all AiO coolers tested so far against the reference air cooler

As usual, the graphs show the average delta temperature of the CPU die relative to room temperature. The subjectively perceived volume is reflected in detail in the respective reviews of the coolers. Let’s start with Aida64:

Now let’s put a big shovel of coal on top of it and power what the system gives us:

I think the graphics speak for themselves, because the “sweet spot” for the RPM values, which was mentioned several times in the reviews, is again very nice and clear. Maximum fan speed usually only gives a little more cooling capacity and is usually not worth the high noise level as a result. At this point I would also like to thank you again for the always constructive criticism in the forum! If you have any further suggestions for improvement, this time is the perfect opportunity to express them in the comments!

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