Purchasing an AIO

Michael Clough · 23 Jan 2018 at 17:52

Hi all,

So I'm looking to upgrade my cooling solution from the stock Wraith Spire on my Ryzen 5 1600.

I haven't got the budget for a custom loop nor do I think my components really need it. I don't have much of a budget at all in fact! But I have seen that AIOs are getting more and more affordable and like the look of the Cooler Master Masterliquid 120 and 240 and reviews are pretty favourable online.

My question is which would be most suited to my processor? I overclock on the stock cooler to 3.8GHz at 1.36V at the moment and it gets to about 74 degrees C when benchmarking for around an hour. I would like to be able to do the same with an AIO but have that extra thermal headroom as I can have extended gaming sessions.

Also, I just know I'm going to be tempted by the next revision of Ryzen and may make the step up a tier.

With that in mind, will the 120 cut it under those circumstances (it will fit in my case much better) or should I get the 240 (but will have to make it fit with some case tinkering)?

Kelt · 23 Jan 2018 at 20:11

if you can fit a 240 then go for it.

Doogles · 23 Jan 2018 at 20:23

BTW you can only have 4 lines in the sig.

Honestly if you are happy with the noise I'd keep the stock cooler, no point in going AIO when the temps are decent and you'll end up with more points of failure with AIO. If you want to lower the temps then a 240mm would be the minimum I'd go with, Cooler Master make some cheap ones for under £40 which wouldn't be a bad idea.

A 120mm won't be that much better than the stock cooler, you'll probably drop the temps by 5c-10c at most.

Michael Clough · 23 Jan 2018 at 21:29

I'll have to fettle my sig when I get to work tomorrow. 4 lines, noted.

Tbh the noise of the stock cooler is part of why I want to switch to an AIO. Even with my Define R3 it sounds like a jet turbine. I'm also thinking with a bit more thermal headroom I might be able to overclock a bit higher too but that's not a priority.

The price difference between the 120 and 240 isn't too much either. The only problem is the way they've placed the 120mm mounting holes in the top of the Define R3. They're centred within the 140mm so there's about 40mm between the 2 120s rather than around 15mm so fitting a 240 would require me to get the drill out...

I can do it and make it neat but if the performance difference wasn't huge between the push pull Masterliquid 120 and the 240 then I would have preferred the 120 for simplicity.

Michael Clough · 24 Jan 2018 at 13:23

After poking around in my case with a tape measure and reading the dims online, I'm pretty confident I can fit a 240 in there without impinging on the MB IO so I'm leaning towards that now. Watched a video on Youtube where the reviewer was pitching a bunch of AIOs against each other on a Threadripper and weirdly enough the Masterliquid 240 outperformed all the 360mm ones in his test and was middling on pretty much the entire suite of metrics he was measuring against despite being by far the cheapest and smallest (which matters in my R3!). But looking at Cooler Master's offerings, they also have a Masterliquid 240 Lite. The specs all look to be exactly the same except the mean time to failure which is half the regular Masterliquid 240 and I can only attribute this to the hose material so I was hoping to find if anyone knew of any other differences? 70000hrs vs 140000hrs was all I could find. If that's the case, for sub-£50 I don't think I can go wrong!