Enermax Liqmax II 240 AIO Cooler Review

All-In-One (AIO) watercoolers have become extremely popular with system builders due to their superior cooling performance and lower noise profile.  Unfortunately AIO coolers have a few limitations and the largest being your case.  For an AIO to be installed your case must have radiator support else you’ll be breaking out the dremel to “make” it fit.  With a standard aircooler you don’t have to worry about fan and radiator placements however with an AIO your cooler choice is almost always dictated by the system you are building.  Going with a 120mm vs 240mm AIO cooler depends on the case you are using to insure it can be installed which could be dictated by the CPU you are installing.

The Enermax Liqmax II 240 is a pretty standard middle of the road cooler.  It can be installed in just about ANY modern computer chassis without issue while still retaining the standard 120mm exhaust fan located near the CPU.  The 240mm size also will cover any modern CPU (except Threadripper) on both stock and overclocked form.  For this review I was using a Core i7 5960X 8 Core CPU on an X99 motherboard.  I chose this CPU because it was one of the last HID cpus with a soldered heatspreader and thus the best chance at getting accurate thermal results.  The new LGA 2066 CPUs have TIM under the heatspreader and often report higher than normal temperatures.  This is something to keep in mind when looking at cooler reviews that focus on load temperatures only as they will be astronomically higher on a TIM CPU.

Overall performance was excellent as you would expect and while our reference cooler was using a larger 280mm radiator the Enermax Liqmax II 240 held its own and was really quite impressive.  I noted that the radiator frame embossing really added some style and the metal frame and backlight really dress up the pump block beyond what you would normally see.  This is an important feature considering that most AIO coolers are just plastic pucks with copper on the bottom.

My only complaint is the hoses and I am a bit conflicted by that.  The hoses used on the Liqmax II are a larger diameter which ideally has a larger internal diameter for better flow.  To keep these hoses from collapsing they need to be made stiffer and thus more difficult to bend.  This can impact how the cooler is installed and how tightly the hoses can be bent into position.  To be honest the rigidity of the hoses wasn’t so much a drawback as an annoyance since it made the cooler difficult to photograph and once you get the cooler installed It really won’t matter.

Excellent Performance
Decorated Radiator Shroud
Metal Pump Block
Backlit Pump Top
120mm PWM Fans Included with Speed Limiting
Advertised 350w TDP Support
Large Diameter Hoses

Large diameter hoses are difficult to bend