Performance
While flashy lights are great a CPU cooler still has to do a good job of cooling your CPU to be worth buying, so how does the ML240 stack up? Well, let’s find out!
All test were done on an Intel i5 6500 inside a Phanteks P300 case using the included thermal paste.
First, let’s test idle temps.
As you can see here the ML240R was able to keep my CPU just a few degrees above room temperature while idling. This is pretty impressive but no one buys a liquid cooler to sit at the desktop screen all day so let’s see what this cooler can really do!
Next up we have the AIDA 64 stress test. I ran this test a total of 3 times, once stressing the CPU with the front panel on, once with the front panel off, and finally once with the CPU and GPU being stressed at the same time with the front panel on. This should give you a decent idea as to how well the AIO can perform without other factors like a restrictive front panel or extra heat from a GPU affecting the performance but still giving you a real world performance test too.
This shows the max temperature after a one hour stress test with the front panel on.
Next, I let the liquid cool off and then ran the same one hour test again with the front panel off and as you can tell there was a pretty decent drop of a few degrees in my max tempatures. This also shows the impressive performance of the ML240R since it kept my CPU within 20c of my room temperature. Also, fun fact the max core temps with the front panel off were only as hot as a normal summer day in Arizona! That’s pretty impressive since most of the time CPUs run hot enough to cook eggs.
Next up I ran a 30 minute dual GPU and CPU stress test with the front panel on to show what the temperatures may be like during a gaming session since the added heat output of a GPU can cause the radiator to heat up and slightly reduce overall performance.
While the performance wasn’t quiet as impressive as the ideal no GPU no front panel test above it still kept my CPU temperatures well under control and I never came close to seeing anything worth worrying about.
Now for the real world gaming test. For this ,I played one match of PUBG, one match of Fortnite and ran around Novigrad in The Witcher 3 to help provide a variety of real world test.
It may be difficult to see but in PUBG I saw max temps around 38-39C even when the CPU was being nearly maxed out. Quite impressive.
In Fortnite the tempatures were a small bit higher than PUBG (Due to the higher frame rate requiring more CPU resources) but it still was impressively low maxing out in the low 40s.
And finally, the most demanding game to be tested. I tested the ML240Rs performance in The Witcher 3 by running around Novigrad for 10-15 minutes in order to keep the CPU and GPU usage high. And as you can tell even though the tempatures are the highest here they are quite impressive still.
Overall the performance of the ML240R is very impressive. While the i5 6500 isn’t the hardest CPU to cool the fact that it maxed out just 20-30c above ambient even when stressed shows that this AIO has a ton of potential and it should be able to handle hotter K series chips and even some decent over clocking with ease.
One thing worth mentioning is the price to performance on the ML240R isn’t the greatest, While it performs amazingly there are other 240mm AIOs from Cooler Master that perform only slightly behind the ML240R but cost a decent amount less. I won’t count this as a con though since a majority of the ML240Rs price is due to the lighting and customizability but I did want to point it out.
Finally, I rate the performance of the ML240R 5/5. While it doesn’t have a bang for the buck factor it still performs really well and looks amazing while doing it. I also love how much overhead for overclocking that this AIO provides so even if you have a K series chip with a 4.8Ghz (maybe even 5Ghz) overclock or something crazy like that you should be able to cool it sufficiently to maintain the fast speeds we all love as gamers.
Now onto the conclusion and final rating!
Pick up the featured product here on Amazon.com for $119.99.
