Gadgetory

for a limited time only by an Intel Core i5 or Core i7 CPU and get a free three-month subscription to iracing.com available from participating retailers click the link in the video description for more details welcome to a long-overdue unboxing of cooler masters side in 120 XL and side in 240 M liquid coolers now the first thing I noticed about these is check this out cooler master has gone ahead and put compatibility for LGA 1150 right on the box now it should be noted that LGA 1150 which is for Haswell or Intel Core i7 i5 and i3 4th generation processors is not really going to be any different from 1155 or 1156 in terms of heatsink compatibility but I mean it's just one of those things where it's all it always amuses me when there are coolers being announced and being shipped that have compatibility for an upcoming socket when you actually can't buy said sockets yet so the main difference between these two coolers is going to be in terms of the size which is a little bit funny to me because the 120 is the XL and the 240 is the M which in terms of North American sizing usually indicates extra-large and medium whereas the 240 millimeter one is definitely extra larger than the medium size 120 millimeter one so let's go ahead and check out what Coolermaster is done in terms of packaging here so these are liquid coats are pre done liquid cooler so actually a few fine we'll start with the outside so they are maintenance-free they're designed for overclocking they use an ultra fine micro channel design for the CPU block itself now what you're going to see right here guys is that this is not an ace attack and it is not a kulit design so Coolermaster has wanted to differentiate themselves from what the other guys in the market are doing and they have done that by well not doing what everyone else in the market is doing which is sort of one way to differentiate yourself from what everyone else is doing on the back you find ultra fine micro channel so pretty much the same a hot durable and powerful water pump dissipates heat effectively and maintains temperatures throughout the stable water circulation all that kind of good stuff ok so let's go ahead and start with the 120 in terms of what's inside we've got some foam on the top we've got mounting hardware which we will be unfamiliar with because it is not the standard ace attack or kulit mounting hardware so let's go ahead and see what we got here I love this nice solid pieces of everything see see solid steel mounting plates so there's your AMD mounting hardware at any rate all right there is your Intel mounting hardware so you can see that screw is able to adjust in position see moves over clicks into place just like that we've got a backplate for Intel so this pops in two different positions as well so it has full compatibility for 775 1155 156 1152 1011 1366 all the sockets you could possibly want and AMD because they haven't changed their mounting hardware and like a bajillion generation just pretty much the same as before same thing here nice solid mounting screws these ones look like they're for LGA 200 it could be for a number of different things but okay there you go again more solid pieces here so it looks like the way it mounts is the backplate comes through the board goes into one of these guys and then the cooler itself mounts to that piece from the other side from the top I like this system there's a number of different coolers that have used it in the past and I find it's very solid very sturdy and works very very well they've also included a splitter for the two fans so there's a PWM splitter which is awesome because it means that you can provide PWM control for both of the fans without actually or yeah without actually having to run one of them off of DC and I mean honestly a lot of motherboards might have all the PWM and connectors in the world on them but it doesn't always work correctly so there you go it's nice to be able to split the CPU on a lot of the time they aren't controllable to the same degree of fine mattoon as the one for the CPU connector is so this is a nice touch Coolermaster includes a couple of 120 millimeter fans and they also include a couple of nice rubber isolating mounts for them so you don't have to worry about any vibrations being transferred to your case and causing your computer louder than necessary these are intended to be installed in a push-pull configuration because if you set them both to push or both to pull you're going to have yourself one heck of a problem this radiator is optimized for its sort of I guess I'd go sort of mid-range in terms of do you have to have higher rpm do you have to can you get away with low rpm because the fin spacing isn't particularly dense which is great for low rpm quiet operation but it is a thicker radiator than you find on most 120 millimeter coolers meaning you'll get a little bit more performance out of it but you also have to have a little bit more static pressure to the fans in order to draw the air that you need through it you can see how coolermaster fills their water cooler so there's a little warranty void if removed plug right there that shouldn't get in the way of anything because once you go ahead and install a fan on it it's not really any higher profile that a fan would be and they're using a quarter-inch corrugated plastic tubing approach that has been in use for well years now on these prefilled liquid coolers and I haven't really been any notable problems with them there's also a rotating fitting right here so you're going to have the flexibility to mount it either sort of this way facing down or if you rotate those like that yeah this way facing up just like that it uses aluminum fins for the radiator itself but there are copper tubes as well as copper tanks and a copper bottom for the block itself you can see they're using a security bit here I actually have one of these so I could take it apart if I felt like it but they're using a security bit to prevent users from taking apart the unit which is not what it is intended for it is meant to be maintenance-free and not opened up or anything sort of bad like that all right so let's have a look at the 240 millimeter version we've got two of the same fans it looks like the noise isolating rubber mounts are not included at least on the fans themselves yes here they are so those are included instead in a very heavy I love heavy mounting hardware it makes me just feel that much more reassured about it so there are a couple of them in with the rest of the mounting hardware where there's thermal compound just like the 120 millimeter version a fan splitter just like the 120 millimeter version and then just more of the same mounting hardware so this is for instead of having it in two separate bags it looks like they've done just one bag for the 240 ml version the radiator itself is a thinner style radiator so you're going to see this one is I'd say mid thickness for the 120 mil and then this is more like standard thickness and then there are some that are actually larger and thicker than this one but those are those are much more rare than these ones and that's for compatibility reasons not all cases are compatible with the thicker style radiators this one in order to make sure that it gets the performance it needs uses a much more dense thin arrangement right here so you can see that it's all about surface area guys so if you have a thicker radiator and you use a less dense thin arrangement versus if you have a thinner radiator and you use a more dense tint arrangement what you've done is you've actually in both cases increased the resistance to air passing through but also increased your surface area and improved performance so generally speaking the less dense the more optimized it is for low rpm fans and the thinner it is the more optimized is for low rpm fans whereas if you were to put even double the density in here and put like you know jet turbine fans on it you could squeeze more performance out of this form factor because surface area is king and that's why the 120 dual 120 millimeter version will perform better than the single 120 millimeter version so you've got that same fill point here at the top that says do not tamper with or remove please don't do that same corrugated plastic quarter-inch fittings or hoses as well as the same rotating fittings down here at the bottom attach to the same block and pump combo this is why I did these unboxings together we've got a copper plate at the bottom that looks what's flat anyway it's hard to oh no it's bowed there you go I wonder if the other one is as well you can tell if you look at them in the light just right yep they're both both so what that does is it increases contact pressure and reduces temperatures as long as you design a mounting mechanism that's rectally sort of optimized for so if you have a CPU here and then you have a boat so this is flat and this is boat and you have a boat surface and then you clamp it down what can happen is you can end up with two flat mating surfaces whereas if you take two flat mating surfaces and you clamp this down a lot at the edges you can end up with a cavity in the middle we discovered this or must have been back in around 2008-2009 DTEC figured it out with their bode block that they were putting o-rings in in order to to blow out the base of it and get a tighter mounting point so there's a little water cooling history lesson for you cooler masters using a very high quality sleeping on the connector so the pump is powered by a three pin that you really can't see any of the color of the wires inside I like this it's a nice touch makes you build look nice and they include of course detailed instructions Coolermaster has been doing liquid coolers for and just coolers in general for a long time so I wouldn't expect anything except nice detailed multilingual instructions for every possible socket and everything labeled and all those sort of good things done it looks like the same instructions for the 120 or the 240 millimeter don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos and thank you for checking out my video on the side and 120m and this are lassie I did it there the side in 120 XL and the side in 240 M