Getting To Meet The Captain
The Captain 240 also adds AMD’s rectangular mounting pattern to its behind-the-motherboard support plate, where Swiftech’s pricier and more-configurable solution requires builders to use their motherboard’s original threaded support plate. While Swiftech’s solution is easier to use, Deepcool’s solution is preferable for those rare motherboards that have unthreaded support plates.
Like its most closely sized rival, the Captain 240 is equipped with a PWM fan hub. However, Deepcool’s hub supports only four fans, and lacking any auxiliary power input, it's limited to the output capacity of a single motherboard fan header.
The Captain 240 doesn’t include a tube of thermal compound, but instead ships with a sheet of the stuff pre-applied. Beneath it, the copper base is very flat and smooth, but not polished.
LGA-2011 (v3) users get a set of standoffs for mounting the Captain 240’s cooling head (the pump and water block combination), while everyone else gets a set of long screws to go with the board’s universal support plate. Both sets of hardware can be seen four photos above, and both sets use the same set of knurled nuts to complete the installation.
The entire pump cap lights up, shining through a clear tube of coolant. We expected to see a few bubbles flushed out upon first use, but those expected bubbles had already been evacuated to the radiator by the time we turned the system on.