Gadgetory

now much like Linus I have been finding myself becoming more and more put off at the thought of reviewing all in one water cooling units I mean they all pretty much look like they're cut from the same mold usually you have a 120 or a 240 millimeter radiator you throw on some ugly fep tubing and a low profile and sometimes really cheap looking pump and bam you have an all-in-one water cooling unit that just blends into the crowd I mean what fun is that so when I open the box for likho tech look for the lik tech yeah funny name I know the lik tech 240 from enter max and admittedly I didn't even realize they made all in one water cooling units before I was immediately shocked by what I found inside EVGA ACX 2.0 cooler with its three phase six slot motor 11 swept fan blades and double ball bearing design offers reduced power noise and thermals for the optimum gaming experience click the link in the description to learn more now the moment I pulled the cooler from the packaging it became apparent from the get-go that this unit was not like other units that I had previously reviewed other brands seem to really place an emphasis on lightweight properties by using plastics and thin walled aluminum radiators coupled with very delicate fins that seem to smash them if you even so much as look at them the wrong way but not this bad boy the first thing I noticed was the cooling fins are extremely heavy duty in fact I was intrigued by how thick these cooling fins were that I felt compelled to run my fingers across them over and over again as you can see just to see how durable they are and you know what they didn't Bend when I first showed pics of this thing on Instagram with the caption of heavy duty some physics folks can't even talk now some folks expressed how unhappy they were with the cheap and delicate feel of other all-in-one coolers that you find on the market and I have to say that I agree in fact sometimes all-in-one cooling units are shipped with pre bent fins removing all of the fun that you have bending them yourself but not this guy and look at that now if you want to bend these fins you better bring some heavy-duty machinery and my time maybe recommend a hammer now you might be thinking Jay why are you spending so much time talking about the fins well the matter of the fact is the fins are typically the most fragile part of any of the all-in-one cooling units and they're part that people are always terrified of smashing and rightfully so you know you move it around trying to get into your case and finagle it in there and you try and install it next thing you know I can lead to some smashed fins and that's not really attractive at all so when I realize that NMX went out of their way to create a unit that would offer protection and high-quality fins I felt that it was actually worth mentioning now some of you may already know that many of the all-in-one coolers that are currently on the market are simply a Sutekh rebrands that's why so many of them would look just the same they're ASA tech rebrands but that's not the case here in fact NR max has actually designed this bad boy completely in-house all the way down to the pump design speaking of pumps believe it or not the pump creates heat and anything that also creates heat must be cooled now oftentimes the coolant passing through the pump not only cools the parts that it's touching you know the CPU the case of all human coolers or maybe the GPU in the case of custom cooling loops but the coolant is also picking up heat from the pump itself now enter max actually realizes this and much like people do on their laying DDC pumps with their custom loops they've actually opted to pre install a heatsink on the top of this pump as well this makes me very happy to see because that means that there is less heat being dumped into the coolant itself meaning for much cooler CPU temperatures for prolonged use now lastly there is a blue LED the pump adding a little bit of bling but unfortunately it is not an RGB LED I'm not sure what companies have against RG B's but I digress now something else that's nice to see is that this thing is made entirely of metal well except for the tubing of course because that would make installation of the sink a complete and utter bitch but the pump and the brackets and even the radiator have a very nice head dooty feel to them thanks to their all-metal design well except for the tubing like we discussed one touch that they added was this kind of a metal shroud that's placed on the radiator now this not only offers a sweet aesthetic to it but it also offers even more protection infernally convinced that I could strap this into my chest and use it as a bulletproof shield I'm not kidding guys this thing is freaking rugged don't do that with other brands now the fans that come with this unit are also pretty interesting in fact the blades have a bit of a sweeping blade to them are a little bit sweeping blade design that not only reduces the chopping sound created by flat bladed fans but this also increases the aesthetic pressure without having to massively increase the RPMs a speaking of rpms these fans have a switch on the hub where you can actually set the max rpm of the fans now when I saw this I was like now they call it their adjustable peak speed or ApS for short and allows the user to set the max RPMs from 1300 2000 or 2500 rpm that's freaking amazing in fact I'm not personally aware of any other fans on the market that offered this feature and I'm not talking about those cheap inline slider switches like the antique fans have but this is managed right at the hub on an electronics level so if you know of any of those any other fans on the market that currently offer this let me know and speak up in the comments kind of like to check them out now as I mentioned earlier the Sweatt blade design offers a high static pressure which is arguably the most important spec when it comes to fans and radiators and these fans are still pushing an impressive 1.7 millimeters of h2o at 1300 rpm 4.7 at 2000 and a whopping 7.4 at 2500 rpm now just to put that into perspective the Corsair SP 120 high performance fans you know they're static optimized pressure fan hence the SP pushes only 3.1 at 2,350 rpm now that's half as good as these enter max fans and don't even get me started on the quiet edition it was actually quite laughable alright alright so I've babbled on long enough about how this thing looks and about the fans let's go ahead and dive into the performance so go ahead and queue up that transition now to really push this thing I decided to hook it up to my Intel 4790k which is of course overclocked now I chose to use this CPU instead of the 5820k in my test bench due to its inherently hot nature of the 4770 and 4790k now it's not very hard to cool the big CPUs like the 58 20 or the 59 30 or even the 8 core 59 60 X do their due to their epoxy based heat spreader now enter max is advertising that they're all metal pump and ceramic bearing are to blame for the lack of noise in fact this thing was so quiet I was almost convinced that I that the pump is not even running at all I'm not even kidding guys because when I powered up the system I touched the pump I felt no vibration whatsoever and I immediately reached to the back of the PSU and I flip the oh switch as I call it to power off the system because I was sure that I was running this or that the pump was not running and I was scared that I was going to damage my CPU now it's freakishly quiet now because I still didn't fully trust this ultra silent pump I mean if you can't hear it it's just not natural anyway I did my first test at stock speeds and voltages which for the 4790k is 4.4 gigs turbo at 1.2 volts and in my surprise the CPU was idling in the upper 20s to low 30s most of the time it was sitting right at 30 degrees Celsius on the socket and the same goes for the cores now when it comes to the load temperatures the socket maxed out at about 52 degrees Celsius with the core sitting in the mid 40s to low 50s and that's 50 degrees Celsius under t.j.maxx for the chip which happens to be 105 before the CPU starts yelling for thermal throttling to keep itself from being cooked to death so yeah the pump is working now that I was convinced that this thing was actually running even though my brain still had a hard time wrapping itself around this absolutely silent nature of this pump I mean again it's just not natural I decided it was time for more power little Tim tool man reference now I decided to take it slow bumping up the speed only a couple hundred megahertz at a time now while I was also increasing the voltage I went to 4.6 gigahertz at 1.33 volts and I ran a 264 suite for 30 minutes to allow all the temperatures to be a stabilize and equalize and the results are absolutely outstanding temperatures for the cores never exceeded the low 80s with the package temps sitting in the upper 80s now sure it's warm but remember this is an all-in-one water cooling unit and we are still well under the danger zone for the CPU 105 degrees Celsius now this wouldn't be Jays two cents if I didn't take some risks so I decided to push my CPU to four point eight gigahertz and it maxed out the voltage all the way up to one point four volts yeah that's well above the recommended voltage for any all-in-one water cooling of it now the results are actually quite amazing the core sat in the mid 80s which is outstanding however the package did reach a temperature of 97 degrees Celsius at which the PC started to thermal slightly or thermal throttle slightly at 3% according to a 264 but the odd part is according to CPU Z the CPU never actually change speeds or voltage and once I pulled back the voltage to 1.35 volts which is the max I recommend for a 24/7 use by the way the results are nothing short of custom loop type performance now temperatures normalized in the mid 70s with a couple of cores reaching the low 80s when processing FPU stress tests but if you look at the screenshot you can see that even when the middle of the star in the middle of stress testing the cores were actually sitting in the upper 60s to mid 70s with the package sitting in the mid 80s the entire time the last thing worth mentioning is that this was all achieved with the max rpm set to 2 to 2000 rpm but the cool thing is that the RPMs can still adjust down by using the BIOS in my z97 classified behind me in fact it's set to 2500 right now but they're only running at 50% speed and even that 1.4 volt test where I got up to 97 degrees Celsius it still wasn't running mac speed on the fans so how do I feel about the animatics liquid tech 240 I think it's a freaking homerun I'm really happy to cited to look at this because especially at a time when the cooler market really is kind of stale and everybody's sort of copying each other enter max has a has clearly spent a good amount of time refining this unit and creating a cooler that they really should be proud of now when it comes to the pros that are plenty the list I mean the fan design is outstanding the aesthetics of the radiator and the pump are unique and hell they're even attractive even the tubing looks good I really do like the look of flat black rubber tubes I'm surprised I've never put one in a custom loop myself now the heatsink on the pump is clearly working because I was specifically making sure to touch it during my stress tests and the top of the pump did seem to be drawing some heat out of the pump now the installation is easy the instructions are very detailed and they're very easy to follow oh yeah and it also cools the CPU too which is kind of a good thing usually but of course there is no such thing as a perfect product and when I'm going to start with at the is the very same thing I have knocked other brands with in the past which is the lack of RGB lighting I mean with so many color combinations available with hardware now red green heck even yellow in my case the blue LED really does seem a bit off even if RGB isn't something they plan to do I would recommend that they at least change the color to white or even at the very least an option to turn the light off altogether now some may say this is due to the lack of intelligence software something that is currently included with all of the models of the Corsair units or all of the AI models of Corsair units I should say but perhaps maybe a toggle switch to change between red green blue and white built into the pump would be something worth considering and would actually make this unit more attractive to themed builders but seriously though at least consider changing the LED to white because that would match so many more units now the last con worth mentioning is that the rpm switch on the fans are inaccessible once the unit is mounted to change the RPMs you have to remove the fan which can be a bit of a pain in the ass should you decide later that you want to reduce the RPMs that they or max rpms that they will spin at this really isn't a huge deal though since really all you're doing is limiting the max rpm and since they are PWM fans you can still slow them down with your onboard CPU fan header like I'm doing behind me in fact it even includes a PWM fan splitter so you can run them on your CPU header but as far as cons go that's really it and even the only cons I could come up with are really nothing more than nitpicks so there you have it guys J is 2 cents on the enter max lick tech 240 I really think they should change the name but if you're shopping for an all-in-one water cooling unit you really should consider this thing for your own rigs in fact I'm putting this very unit inside my CES portable PC that I'm building yes I will be doing a video on that in the future it really is just plain badass now if you want to know where you can buy the unit or you just want to learn more about it check out the links down in the description for more information now also if you have any questions or you just want to chat I love interacting with the fans of the channel and talking tech with you guys is a whole lot of fun so feel free to head on over to twitter at JS 2 cents or facebook and hit me up now as always guys thank you for watching you guys make the channel a whole lot of fun to keep working on and as always I hope to see you guys in the next one take care you