CM MasterLiquid Pro
An all new All-in-One
PRICE $ 160 coolermaster.com Cooler
Master has taken the traditional All-in-One water cooler and utterly changed what to expect. This is a radically different take on the AIO design, merging all of the separate components into one rather sexy whole. But does it do a decent job?
Most AIOs are comprised of a water block with built-in pump, attached to a separate radiator by way of a couple of tubes. They’re an easy way to get into water cooling, but they take up a lot more space than a standard air cooler. The MasterLiquid Maker 92 takes all of these bits and pieces and smooshes them together into a single unit that is about the same size as the larger air coolers.
We’ve bashed Cooler Master’s mounting mechanisms in the past for being more complex than a 12-sided Rubik’s Cube (A Rubik’s Dodecagon? – Ed), so it was with great relief to discover they’ve fixed this issue with this cooler. It is a total cinch to install, using a method that is very similar to Corsair’s awesome mounting system. It can be positioned both horizontally or vertically, as the cooling plate is mounted on a pair of arms that rotate 90 degrees. It measures 99.9 x 81.6 x 167.5mm in vertical mode, and 99.9 x 142 x 118.8mm when in horizontal mode.
The base uses the same c opper material of most AIOs, while the aluminium radiator has a fan on each side. Cooler Master claims it has used “microchannels” within the base plate to maximise the surface area that the water touches as it flows through the base. Ditto with the fins in the aluminium radiator, which should help more air make contact with the heated fins. We have no way to confirm these claims for ourselves, but we also don’t see any reason to doubt their veracity.
Cooler Master has made it very clear that this is not designed to be a high-performance water cooler – it’s not aimed at the overclocking market. But who’s going to buy a water cooler if not overclockers? If you’re not routinely pushing your CPU to melting point, then what’s the point of a having an advanced cooling solution when standard air cooling will do just as well?
To test the unit, we used our standard i7-6700K with an operating voltage of 1.25V. We used AIDA64 to put the CPU under load, and measured both load times after 30 minutes of running this benchmark. 30 minutes later we then tested the idle temperatures.
At idle, the CPU reached a breezy 30C,
Cooler Master has made it very clear that this is not designed to be a highperformance water cooler
in a room temperature of 25C. This a decent result, yet still gets beaten by our beloved Noctua NH-D15, which recorded an idle temp of 27C. Under load, the Cooler Master hit a rather steamy 66C, a full 5C higher than our Noctua. Both units measured 44dB during our fan test when cranked up to 100% fan speed.
It’s certainly an interesting design, and yet the high price and lower performance means it’s still not taking the place of our preferred cooler Noctua’s DH15, even if it is slightly smaller. BENNETT RING