Cooler Master MasterLiquid 360L Core AiO CPU compact water cooling in the test – Make it big!

Methodology

Cooling an AMD Ryzen 9 3950X at various levels of power consumption is required, joined by 16GB Crucial Ballistix Sport (2x8GB) DDR4 memory on an MSI B550 Tomahawk (BIOS 7C91vAB). The Asus ROG Strix GTX 1060 6GB runs in zero-fan mode for the CPU stress tests only, and a Fractal Design Ion Gold 750W serves as the power source. The whole thing is housed in the Thermaltake Core P3 as an open benchtable.

The test system runs on Windows 10 Pro 22H2 (build 19045.2251). All data sets are captured with HWInfo64 v7.34-4930 – 5000ms logging, the specified temperature is derived from the sensor CPU Die (Average). Since I don’t have air conditioning, the values in the graphs are the delta between room temperature and CPU temperature. This allows a fair comparison of all cooling systems, even if the ambient temperature is different. The thermal paste included with the cooler or pre-applied is used in each case.

I determine the sound level with a Voltcraft SL-200 meter at a distance of 40cm, which operates in 125ms cycles in Lo mode. The room was measured at 33.2 dB(A), an external sample table helps with the breakdown.

 

Benchmarks

In the first test run, a loudness of 40 dB(A) was set at 40cm from the center of the pump and fans on the radiator, in my setup that’s 43% PWM on the radiator fans and 100% PWM on the pump:

And after that, this compact water cooling system is still allowed to show what the can achieve in terms of cooling performance at maximum speed, regardless of the volume. A maximum of 52.9 dB(A) was achieved at 100% PWM and 40cm distance.

A full comparison to other coolers can be found here:

Roundup and re-measurement of all tested CPU air and water coolers

Summary and conclusion

While the 240mm variant of the new Core series was still able to hold its own against the other AiO water coolers with the same radiator size, the 360L is more likely to be found in the bottom third at the time of publishing this article.

With a pre-release MSRP for the EU market of €114.99, a 360mm AiO complete with RGB fans is priced quite well, but I hope to see the actual “street price” drop to under €100 before you can call this a truly interesting budget option.

The test sample was provided by Cooler Master without obligation. There was and is no influence on the tests and results. There was also no compensation for expenses and no obligation to publish.