Soldato
Antec Mercury 120MM RGB AIO CPU cooler
Available here from Overclockers
Details on Antec's website here
Introduction
@Ace Modder gave a few of us an opportunity to review Antec’s new RGB Mercury AIO liquid cooler. For me it was a great opportunity to see how well a AIO cooler with it’s limitations of fixed hose lengths could work in a really confined space. This review will concentrate more on the experience of using the cooler rather than benchmarks comparing it against other coolers - since I've not got much to compare it with.
Packaging, Unboxing and First Impressions
First Impression, the cooler comes in a sturdy box with clear details of what’s within it alongside some standalone photos. It’s got the details of what you want to know, without being an information overload like some hardware packaging.
Within the box, under the layer of protective polystyrene you’ll find a combination of cardboard and plastic airbags keep everything snug and well protected. Note that I’d already removed and popped the airbag before taking this photo… oops
Taking the individual components out, everything comes within it’s own clearly labelled bag. One thing that’s nice to see here is that all the bags containing smaller parts are resealable bags - so you don’t have to worry about unused parts going MIA over time.
Cables for both RGB lighting options are included, so whether you are wanting to connect up to a compatible motherboard to control them or have it standalone Antec have you covered.
Finally, the block/pump assembly comes with thermal paste pre-applied. It’s protected with a plastic cover that prevents the past being touched accidentally. Overall first impressions are good.
Build Quality and Design
Working through the individual components the good impressions continue. Plastic CPU backplates are included for various sockets and feel plenty sturdy, the backplate needs to be bolted through the motherboard so unless you have a really unusual case design this will require motherboard removal. The bolts which are used to lock the plate down onto the motherboard have non-metal washers built onto them so there’s no concern of shorting anything on the board - it’s nice that they’re built on rather than having to fiddle around fitting these yourself.
The fan has a stylish design the somewhat translucent white ring that will later be lit up in all the colours under the sun, the fan also has rubber mounts on both sides to isolate it from the rest of a case for minimal vibration - another nice feature. There is one minor criticism however, the cable for the fan comes out of the frame in a corner and can get in the way when trying to put the long screws through the fan if you are mounting the setup in this manner. For some builds it may be easy to keep the cable out of the way whilst doing this, for me it proved to be a pain. However as criticisms go this is pretty minor. All cables are braided and look good, there is plenty of length available to route cleanly within a case.
Moving onto the the AIO assembly. The radiator is, well, it’s a radiator. It’s pretty compact, light due to it’s aluminium construction and the radiator fins aren’t overly dense - so the fan shouldn’t have to work hard to to push air through, good for noise potentially less good for cooling.
The hoses seem to be really good quality, they’re braided and coated in Teflon. The connections at both ends appeared solid and I’m confident that unless you are really hamfisted you aren’t going to be breaking connections and causing leaks.
The block & pump assembly is bulky for a water block, but significantly more compact than any air cooling solution. This size should give both decent surface area for the block part for optimal cooling and a large pump that isn’t overly stressed to allow for quiet operation and hopefully long life. The hoses coming off of the block are at right angles and can twist, this is useful but not game changing - as the hoses themselves won’t twist and the radiator end is rigid, meaning the best you can do is twist both the same way for cleaner routing and hope you can position the radiator appropriately. The white outside of the block rubberised and looks like it should be slightly translucent to light up along with the rest of the cooler, this turned out to not be the case for me. Aesthetically I don’t really “get” the rubberised outside, it can be moved around slightly on the block, doesn’t light up and can’t be removed. It by no means looks bad, I just think that maybe Antec could have made the whole thing look more interesting.
Test System and Building
The test system, as described in the intro is a space constrained Silverstone SG03. This is my main rig that gets dragged to LANParties 5-10 times a year, so squeezing as much hardware into a minimal space is key. Specs below:
Intel i5 3570k
ASRock Z77 Pro4-M
4x 4GB sticks of Corsair Vengeance
Asus 1070GTX OC Dual
Asus Xonar DX
2x SSD
2x Mechanical disks
With this case there’s a height restriction for the CPU cooler that limits choice, and until now I’ve been running a Scythe Shuriken on the CPU to try and keep the temperature in check. The somewhat self induced problem I had was the orientation of the cooler, from memory this orientation was forced on me by the high profile RAM - the fins are horizontal and one side is straight up obscured by the memory’s heatsinks. Lack of room for airflow led to my CPU temps hitting 80 degrees regularly, heat wouldn’t get out of the case easily either - even when I squeezed a crossflow fan into the top of the case to try and vent some air. So everything ran really warm all the time, this year’s toasty summer meant the sides were off with a deskfan pointing at it a lot of the time... On paper, if it fits, the Mercury should help resolve a few of these issues at once - less airflow being obscured, better cpu temps and some added sparkle for the LANs. Here’s the before view:
After removing the PSU and the 1070 I started looking into how to even fit the cooler into the case. Some trial and error lead to me realising I’d need to shift both front fans down on the front grill to allow me to bolt through them into the radiator. Annoyingly this means that one of the fans is partially obscured by a part of the grill - maybe I’ll have to do a DIY mod on this in the future to help airflow and allow the RGB to show better, but for now it’s a compromise I had to accept. Considering I had spent an hour or two tinkering and planning at this point I was happy to be able to get it mounted at all without having to mod the case.
In order to use up the tubing slack I had to twist the block around to avoid causing myself other problems, despite the relative lack of flexibility this was pretty easy to do. Having to just drop the cooler onto the pre-fitted bolts and tighten just makes things so much easier, I find it baffling why so many air coolers seem to still persist with the clip/pop mechanisms!
PSU cabling went in that this point as there’s no way to reach in and connect the P4 cable afterwards. Also plugged in the ATX at this point due to lack of room, the release clip is obscured by the radiator… so not going to be removing that easily, that’s a problem for future me!
Squeeze the graphics card in at an angle before putting the PSU in (can’t do it in the other order…) and get some level of cable management on the go. Picture taken with the machine running, in the dark, on a tripod with a really long exposure expecting it to look rubbish. Instead the case is being lit from the inside and it looks pretty sweet!
All assembled and side panel on. Looks a little something like this. No video at this time as I’ve not got a suitable video camera. Gif showing the range of colours however. Check out Rugrat’s review if you want video - his case shows it much better!
So in review, a challenging build but a good result. First impressions are nice and quiet and the RGB lights are good even if less so than they would be on other cases. Fixing the fan grill at the front to not hide the fans, combined with adding a second of these fans beneath the radiator would look great.
Performance Impressions
As mentioned earlier this section isn’t going to be hugely deep as I didn’t have detailed before benchmarks and don’t have multiple coolers to compare. However I know the CPU was regularly hitting 80 degrees, even without the heat from the graphics card keeping it warm. The PSU would be fairly hot to the touch and the top of the case would be warm. All this whilst being pretty noisy with all the fans going.
General impressions on switching to the Mercury have shown my CPU has dropped 20-30 degrees in load temperatures, idle is notably lower, the rest of the components are cooler and under less stress and everything is quieter. The latter is down to general improvements in ventilation, better fans (in addition to the Mercury I swapped out the second of my old case fans out with a Noctua NF-S12A that happily sits there ticking over at 500rpm whilst moving just as much air as the old) and the lower temps allowing me to change the fan profile to be far more relaxed in bios. Maybe I’ve got some overclocking headroom....
All in all I’m massively impressed at the performance considering it’s only a 120mm radiator, with a partially obscured fan and a restricted amount of room. The Antec Mercury has absolutely gone beyond my expectations here. Under normal gaming load the fan spins up and starts to become louder, but I’ve not noticed it as a problem as I don’t game in silence - It’s certainly not an issue. Even when under a full synthetic load (Prime 95 Small FFTs) the fan is not loud to the point where you can’t hear music or games. Realistically I think anyone who required a machine to sit at 100% load but remain quiet is going to be buying something more than a 120mm AIO cooler, so I’m not going to call this a negative!
Stress Testing
Using Prime95 Small FFTs at stock settings, this result is after approx 5 minutes with the CPU is hitting it’s peak temperature and not varying significantly. Temps were nice and low here compared to what I'd had on air, easily 20 degrees lower. Clock speed variation presumably due to the Boost clocks finding a happy ground, I'll confess to not knowing enough about them to explain further.
With this huge headroom in temperature I’m not used to I dusted off my overclocking gloves, not something I’ve done for maybe 8 years? After a bit of digging around, some trial and error and even reading the manual… I upped the clock speed to 4.2GHz and left the motherboard to worry about the rest. I tried for 4.4GHz and whilst I got it into Windows by upping the voltage offset it was failing in Prime95 - test for another day maybe. I've been running the rig for the past few days at this clock speed and can confirm that temps are great when gaming, rarely going beyond around 55 and no concerns with the temperature of the PSU or other components.
Regardless - here’s the Prime95 load test result:
Conclusions
In short, a great bit of kit from Antec with a few minor niggles - probably all of which are personal preference or a one off issue. Whilst fitting the required bracket to the block, I had an issue in that the screws appeared to be too long. Even when done as tight as seemed reasonable there was a slight bit of play in the bracket, which was concerning. It’s not caused any issue once the block was mounted to the motherboard, perhaps the rest being tight has kept it in place. Speaking to [HB]Rugrat, one of the other reviews - it seems that it may just be that I need to tighten them harder, I’ll look into this next time I’ve got the machine in bits and update!
Pros:
Final Thoughts
A big thanks to Ace Modder and Antec for the opportunity to test and review the hardware. It’s reminded me how much I enjoy building pcs! I now want to dig out all the watercooling from the loft and consider a doing a custom loop again.
Available here from Overclockers
Details on Antec's website here
Introduction
@Ace Modder gave a few of us an opportunity to review Antec’s new RGB Mercury AIO liquid cooler. For me it was a great opportunity to see how well a AIO cooler with it’s limitations of fixed hose lengths could work in a really confined space. This review will concentrate more on the experience of using the cooler rather than benchmarks comparing it against other coolers - since I've not got much to compare it with.
Packaging, Unboxing and First Impressions
First Impression, the cooler comes in a sturdy box with clear details of what’s within it alongside some standalone photos. It’s got the details of what you want to know, without being an information overload like some hardware packaging.
Within the box, under the layer of protective polystyrene you’ll find a combination of cardboard and plastic airbags keep everything snug and well protected. Note that I’d already removed and popped the airbag before taking this photo… oops
Taking the individual components out, everything comes within it’s own clearly labelled bag. One thing that’s nice to see here is that all the bags containing smaller parts are resealable bags - so you don’t have to worry about unused parts going MIA over time.
Cables for both RGB lighting options are included, so whether you are wanting to connect up to a compatible motherboard to control them or have it standalone Antec have you covered.
Finally, the block/pump assembly comes with thermal paste pre-applied. It’s protected with a plastic cover that prevents the past being touched accidentally. Overall first impressions are good.
Build Quality and Design
Working through the individual components the good impressions continue. Plastic CPU backplates are included for various sockets and feel plenty sturdy, the backplate needs to be bolted through the motherboard so unless you have a really unusual case design this will require motherboard removal. The bolts which are used to lock the plate down onto the motherboard have non-metal washers built onto them so there’s no concern of shorting anything on the board - it’s nice that they’re built on rather than having to fiddle around fitting these yourself.
The fan has a stylish design the somewhat translucent white ring that will later be lit up in all the colours under the sun, the fan also has rubber mounts on both sides to isolate it from the rest of a case for minimal vibration - another nice feature. There is one minor criticism however, the cable for the fan comes out of the frame in a corner and can get in the way when trying to put the long screws through the fan if you are mounting the setup in this manner. For some builds it may be easy to keep the cable out of the way whilst doing this, for me it proved to be a pain. However as criticisms go this is pretty minor. All cables are braided and look good, there is plenty of length available to route cleanly within a case.
Moving onto the the AIO assembly. The radiator is, well, it’s a radiator. It’s pretty compact, light due to it’s aluminium construction and the radiator fins aren’t overly dense - so the fan shouldn’t have to work hard to to push air through, good for noise potentially less good for cooling.
The hoses seem to be really good quality, they’re braided and coated in Teflon. The connections at both ends appeared solid and I’m confident that unless you are really hamfisted you aren’t going to be breaking connections and causing leaks.
The block & pump assembly is bulky for a water block, but significantly more compact than any air cooling solution. This size should give both decent surface area for the block part for optimal cooling and a large pump that isn’t overly stressed to allow for quiet operation and hopefully long life. The hoses coming off of the block are at right angles and can twist, this is useful but not game changing - as the hoses themselves won’t twist and the radiator end is rigid, meaning the best you can do is twist both the same way for cleaner routing and hope you can position the radiator appropriately. The white outside of the block rubberised and looks like it should be slightly translucent to light up along with the rest of the cooler, this turned out to not be the case for me. Aesthetically I don’t really “get” the rubberised outside, it can be moved around slightly on the block, doesn’t light up and can’t be removed. It by no means looks bad, I just think that maybe Antec could have made the whole thing look more interesting.
Test System and Building
The test system, as described in the intro is a space constrained Silverstone SG03. This is my main rig that gets dragged to LANParties 5-10 times a year, so squeezing as much hardware into a minimal space is key. Specs below:
Intel i5 3570k
ASRock Z77 Pro4-M
4x 4GB sticks of Corsair Vengeance
Asus 1070GTX OC Dual
Asus Xonar DX
2x SSD
2x Mechanical disks
With this case there’s a height restriction for the CPU cooler that limits choice, and until now I’ve been running a Scythe Shuriken on the CPU to try and keep the temperature in check. The somewhat self induced problem I had was the orientation of the cooler, from memory this orientation was forced on me by the high profile RAM - the fins are horizontal and one side is straight up obscured by the memory’s heatsinks. Lack of room for airflow led to my CPU temps hitting 80 degrees regularly, heat wouldn’t get out of the case easily either - even when I squeezed a crossflow fan into the top of the case to try and vent some air. So everything ran really warm all the time, this year’s toasty summer meant the sides were off with a deskfan pointing at it a lot of the time... On paper, if it fits, the Mercury should help resolve a few of these issues at once - less airflow being obscured, better cpu temps and some added sparkle for the LANs. Here’s the before view:
After removing the PSU and the 1070 I started looking into how to even fit the cooler into the case. Some trial and error lead to me realising I’d need to shift both front fans down on the front grill to allow me to bolt through them into the radiator. Annoyingly this means that one of the fans is partially obscured by a part of the grill - maybe I’ll have to do a DIY mod on this in the future to help airflow and allow the RGB to show better, but for now it’s a compromise I had to accept. Considering I had spent an hour or two tinkering and planning at this point I was happy to be able to get it mounted at all without having to mod the case.
In order to use up the tubing slack I had to twist the block around to avoid causing myself other problems, despite the relative lack of flexibility this was pretty easy to do. Having to just drop the cooler onto the pre-fitted bolts and tighten just makes things so much easier, I find it baffling why so many air coolers seem to still persist with the clip/pop mechanisms!
PSU cabling went in that this point as there’s no way to reach in and connect the P4 cable afterwards. Also plugged in the ATX at this point due to lack of room, the release clip is obscured by the radiator… so not going to be removing that easily, that’s a problem for future me!
Squeeze the graphics card in at an angle before putting the PSU in (can’t do it in the other order…) and get some level of cable management on the go. Picture taken with the machine running, in the dark, on a tripod with a really long exposure expecting it to look rubbish. Instead the case is being lit from the inside and it looks pretty sweet!
All assembled and side panel on. Looks a little something like this. No video at this time as I’ve not got a suitable video camera. Gif showing the range of colours however. Check out Rugrat’s review if you want video - his case shows it much better!
So in review, a challenging build but a good result. First impressions are nice and quiet and the RGB lights are good even if less so than they would be on other cases. Fixing the fan grill at the front to not hide the fans, combined with adding a second of these fans beneath the radiator would look great.
Performance Impressions
As mentioned earlier this section isn’t going to be hugely deep as I didn’t have detailed before benchmarks and don’t have multiple coolers to compare. However I know the CPU was regularly hitting 80 degrees, even without the heat from the graphics card keeping it warm. The PSU would be fairly hot to the touch and the top of the case would be warm. All this whilst being pretty noisy with all the fans going.
General impressions on switching to the Mercury have shown my CPU has dropped 20-30 degrees in load temperatures, idle is notably lower, the rest of the components are cooler and under less stress and everything is quieter. The latter is down to general improvements in ventilation, better fans (in addition to the Mercury I swapped out the second of my old case fans out with a Noctua NF-S12A that happily sits there ticking over at 500rpm whilst moving just as much air as the old) and the lower temps allowing me to change the fan profile to be far more relaxed in bios. Maybe I’ve got some overclocking headroom....
All in all I’m massively impressed at the performance considering it’s only a 120mm radiator, with a partially obscured fan and a restricted amount of room. The Antec Mercury has absolutely gone beyond my expectations here. Under normal gaming load the fan spins up and starts to become louder, but I’ve not noticed it as a problem as I don’t game in silence - It’s certainly not an issue. Even when under a full synthetic load (Prime 95 Small FFTs) the fan is not loud to the point where you can’t hear music or games. Realistically I think anyone who required a machine to sit at 100% load but remain quiet is going to be buying something more than a 120mm AIO cooler, so I’m not going to call this a negative!
Stress Testing
Using Prime95 Small FFTs at stock settings, this result is after approx 5 minutes with the CPU is hitting it’s peak temperature and not varying significantly. Temps were nice and low here compared to what I'd had on air, easily 20 degrees lower. Clock speed variation presumably due to the Boost clocks finding a happy ground, I'll confess to not knowing enough about them to explain further.
With this huge headroom in temperature I’m not used to I dusted off my overclocking gloves, not something I’ve done for maybe 8 years? After a bit of digging around, some trial and error and even reading the manual… I upped the clock speed to 4.2GHz and left the motherboard to worry about the rest. I tried for 4.4GHz and whilst I got it into Windows by upping the voltage offset it was failing in Prime95 - test for another day maybe. I've been running the rig for the past few days at this clock speed and can confirm that temps are great when gaming, rarely going beyond around 55 and no concerns with the temperature of the PSU or other components.
Regardless - here’s the Prime95 load test result:
Conclusions
In short, a great bit of kit from Antec with a few minor niggles - probably all of which are personal preference or a one off issue. Whilst fitting the required bracket to the block, I had an issue in that the screws appeared to be too long. Even when done as tight as seemed reasonable there was a slight bit of play in the bracket, which was concerning. It’s not caused any issue once the block was mounted to the motherboard, perhaps the rest being tight has kept it in place. Speaking to [HB]Rugrat, one of the other reviews - it seems that it may just be that I need to tighten them harder, I’ll look into this next time I’ve got the machine in bits and update!
Pros:
- Well labeled parts, simple to fit (within reason - c’mon it’s a tiny case!)
- Solid performance, able to be both Cool and Quiet - usually at the same time
- The RGB offers lots of lighting options, plus if it isn’t your thing you can just turn it off.
- 2x sata power connectors are required to run both the pump + lighting. To me this seems excessive as it led to me having to hunt down some additional PSU cables!
- Water block mount - loose bracket (see note in conclusion)
- Cable / Tubing length - too long for me. Just an observation here, it’s longer than feels needed in an SFF case. Wouldn’t be an issue in a larger case, so consider this point to be just something to keep in mind when buying any AIO liquid cooler! What you gain in simplicity vs a custom loop you lose in other areas.
Final Thoughts
A big thanks to Ace Modder and Antec for the opportunity to test and review the hardware. It’s reminded me how much I enjoy building pcs! I now want to dig out all the watercooling from the loft and consider a doing a custom loop again.
