ID-Cooling Frostflow 240L

Budget… Sort of

FINDING A 240MM dual rad at this price is fairly impressive. There are a few alternatives from the likes of Cooler Master and Thermaltake, both with their own flaws, but the biggest challenge comes from Corsair’s Hydro H105 240mm AIO. Coming in at $104, it’s only $4 more than the Frostflow 240L, and that’s a problem for the plucky underdog.

Whether it’s the mounting system, the materials, the finish, you name it—the Frostflow falls short in almost every way. But that’s to be expected. Corsair is a well-known brand, one that almost singlehandedly pioneered AIO liquid-cooling.

The mounting system isn’t awful—the fact you can mount it in stages, without needing to balance the two parts together, makes it fairly effective. The problem? The backplate. It’s steel, and is padded with a block of foam to prevent shorts upon contact with the mobo. Not a terrible idea, but with support for 1366, 1150/ X, and 775 sockets, there’s a plethora of holes precut into the foam to allow you to thread your screws through. Except the holes are all a touch too small. Pushing them through begins to tear the foam away from the backplate. The best way to install them is to thread them through the opposite side first, pushing the foam against the backplate, to widen the openings, then push them back through the correct way. Then it’s a case of lining up your backplate with the holes in your mobo, attaching washers on the motherboard side, and securing the backplate with four long threaded nuts acting as stand-offs. After which, thermal paste down, CPU block on, and secure in place with the thumb screws.

But the big problem is appearance. It’s hard to get past how cheap the Frostflow looks. The braided cable is nice, the rad a decent quality, but the fans and CPU block seem crafted out of cheap plastic, designed to break upon impact. The texture is just unpleasant, and the LED ring oscillating round in a circle is untameable by any form of desktop control.

That said, it’s not all about looks. And where the Frostflow does shine is in its performance. It’s a strong contender in the 240mm market, performing as well as any we’ve seen, even giving our 280mm NZXT Kraken X62 a run for its money. It’s not a super-thick radiator, but the included fans do a good job of shifting enough cool air past the radiator fins to draw excess heat out of the system without causing a ruckus. Our testing suite lets the standard PWM fan profiles included with Asus’s Maximus IX Hero manage the fan speed, and it was fairly inaudible even under load.

ID-Cooling’s Frostflow is a flawed yet interesting first product from the new kid on the block. It throws punches and includes LED lighting that other competitors don’t at this price. Yet it falls flat on overall design, and could do with a touch of refinement when it comes to the AIO mounting procedure. –ZAK STOREY

ID-Cooling Frostflow 240L

THERMAL VOID Mounting system better than some; good performance; solid price.

SLURRY Aesthetics need a lot of work; mounting system still flawed.

$100, www.idcooling.com