Cooler Master Shows Off Armada of Crazy AIOs and Water Cooling Solutions.
Cooler Master’s vortex creating reservoir may look terrifying, but that’s far from the truth.
Computex this year could be summed up with one word, cooling. Yeah sure, we’ve seen the advent of AMD’s Ryzen 3 series, been teased with Navi, had Intel launch, yet another 14nm refresh part, and seen Nvidia do, well, something. But not once have we seen so many companies (Cooler Master, Corsair, EK, Phanteks, and Alphacool), all launch into the field of liquid-cooling or improve their stock so dramatically quite like this. The one on the chopping block today? Cooler Master. And boy do they want you to know about it.
For those that don’t know, Cooler Master’s background in liquid-cooling has typically lived outside of the world of us meagre humble consumers. They’re the brains behind a lot of stock GPU coolers out there, behind the cold plates chilling your phones, behind all those AMD CPU reference coolers, and more. At last, the company’s decided to spearhead a movement to expand into the open-loop market, with its own selection of reservoir, pumps, radiators, and fittings. Oh and of course, throw in three new crazy AIO parts too.
Vortexes for days
What you’re looking at here, is an impressively small, yet powerful pump/resevoir combo, designed entirely in house by Cooler Master. For the initiated, there’s one major problem with it, that massive spinning vortex in the middle. Typically this is bad news for open loop liquid-cooling, as a vortex draws air-bubbles down into your system, and where there’s air, thermal conductivity falls, and you get little hot pockets inside your rig. That’s not good. However here, Cooler Master have introduced a secondary layer below the vortex that siphons out all the air-bubbles, keeping your loop safe and keeping this, let’s face it, ridiculously cool (no pun intended) feature visible for all to see.
On top of that, the company is also throwing in its own custom fittings finished in matte black, hard tubing, radiators and we’re told a new variant of its CPU block as well, although that was unfortunately unavailable. There’s no date, or price confirmed yet for the individual parts, but Cooler Master did hint that it would be selling the whole lot as a kit for roughly around $350 when it does launch later this year. However no UK pricing just yet.
OLED Displays Masterliquid ML240P VIVID
And it wouldn’t be Computex without some brand new AIO liquid-coolers too. Welcome Cooler Master’s latest all in one, the ML240P Vivid, complete with LCD display and frankly stunning aesthetic appeal. This thing is a beast, and actually has its own fairly substantial resolution. You can control what stats, or graphics that you want to display on it using some of Cooler Master’s (still in development) proprietary software. Or, theoretically we’ve been told you could even watch a film on it, if that was your thing, although that might take a bit more work on the developer side of things.
Outside of that it’s very much your standard AIO cooler supporting both Intel and AMD processors, and coming in at around $240 some time this year, complete with 2x 120mm RGB fans, and your standard 240mm radiator too.
Meet the ML240P Dual Mirage AIO
But let’s not forget the real big beastie of Cooler Master’s whole shebang this year. The Dual Mirage AIO. Now, we’ve seen the company redesign its AIO lineup with the new logo, and some new styling with its standard ML240P Mirage cooler, but what’s better than one pump? Two, that’s what.
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The Dual Mirage features two pumps running in tandem that are elevated off of the CPU to allow for better clearance for memory. It looks impressive to say the least, however the big benefits come, at least according to Cooler Master, thanks to the increased pressure it can exert on the coolant. Moving more coolant faster along a loop theoretically increases the cooling potential of that loop, as that heat is spending less time near the processor.
Theoretically it’s a good idea, however CM is still tinkering with just how the internal setup should work. Figuring out whether it’s better to run one pump in push, and one pump in pull, or just run both in parallel. We did ask whether, given the size of this monster, and the fact it features two pumps whether it’d be possible to expand this out into a GPU as well, however CM’s holding back on the details as to whether that’s possible. Expect this for $200 some time this year. Check out more of our Computex coverage here.
As Associate Editor of Tom's Hardware's prestigous British division, Zak specializes in system building, case reviews and peripherals, and has a particular penchant for liquid-cooling. He's also a lover of all things Viking/Scandinavian (thus the poor attempt at a beard).