Performance
Below you can see additional photos of the PC with installed LIQTECH II cooler. Tests were performed on a different setup so all coolers on the list could be directly compared.
Now let’s take a look at test results.
On the list, we have a couple of new coolers. Most are all-in-one liquid coolers which are performing better than typical air cooling solutions but take more space. All coolers are working at automatic settings, as specified by the manufacturer. The only exception is Enermax LIQTECH which was tested at automatic and maximum fan speed.
The temperature in idle state isn’t really important as depends on the cooling solution, fans spin faster or slower. Reviewed Enermax cooler will keep fans at about 500 RPM when CPU isn’t under higher load. Actually, we could see as low as 300 RPM in the idle state. Even during mixed load tests which base on PCMark 10, the Liqtech was keeping fans below 1000 RPM, about 700 RPM for most of the time.
Enermax fans are quiet and at anything below 1000 RPM, we won’t even hear them. I don’t want to compare the noise in dB scale as it won’t tell us if the cooler generates additional, annoying noises like air whistling. In this case, we won’t hear anything like that but I won’t hide that once the pump is at its maximum speed then we may hear quiet clicking. I recommend connecting the pump to the AIO header on the motherboard or higher power fan header. Once we set balanced or even high-performance mode then we won’t hear anything (at least in a closed PC case).
Full load tests have slightly changed the situation. We could see up to 1500 RPM in the AIDA64 FPU test, which is using the latest CPU instructions and heats up the CPU much more than most benchmarks. The temperature is lower than expected which just confirms how well this cooler handles our 8-core CPU. After adjusting fan profiles in BIOS we are able to tame the fans and make it run really quiet even under full load. Once we set RPM below 1200, the temperature will reach about 80°C what is still much below the maximum safe temperature of the i7-9700K processor.
We can always set maximum fan speed which is about 2300 RPM. I recommend that only to those who are testing PC hardware or push CPUs to the limits. Our i7-9700K is not the best overclocker and its maximum frequency will be about 5.1GHz but if you are thinking about the i9-9900K then Enermax LIQTECH II seems like one of the best options on the market.
