Performance
If you’re running this cooler on a low TDP processor, or at stock clocks, there’s no doubt that it’ll give you fantastic temperatures. It made easy work here, even managing to beat out the Cooler Master Masterliquid 240 by 1c.
Pushing the heat up, the Masterliquid 120 did lose some ground on our charts, and while it would still be fine for running a system at these clocks, it’s clear that the Masterliquid 240 is better equipped to handle more extreme workloads.
At stock clocks, the Masterliquid 120 and the 240 were delivering the same acoustic performance. The pump is virtually silent, one of the quietest I’ve ever tested, and the fan noise was barely a whisper.
Again, identical performance to the 240, which is pretty impressive as 120mm radiators usually require the fans to work harder. I retested with the fan profile pushed higher, and by increasing the dBa by +2, it’s possible to shave a few degrees off the load temperatures; perhaps CM need to tweak their PWM profiles, although it’s not hard to do so yourself.
