Cooler Master MasterLiquid Pro 280 CPU Cooler Review

Peter Donnell / 8 years ago

A Closer Look

The build quality on this cool is rock solid, and from the moment I took it out of the box, it was clear this wasn’t your every day AIO. The cooling pipes alone are freaking huge, with a tight and durable braiding to keep them protected, and plenty of thickness to allow for maximum flow at low pressure.

The pump housing is huge too, with a dual chamber one on top of the other design, the warm liquid flow is in chamber separated from the cold, and uses a small bridge pipe between the two. This is the Cooler Master FlopOp technology, and is said to be able to help reduce the CPU temperatures compared to a regular pump configuration.

The top of the cooler features a clear panel, with some blue lighting built-in. It looks like you would be able to see liquid flowing in here, but that’s not the case, you can simply see the top of the FlowOp housing under the cover.

The pump may stand quite tall from the CPU, but the actual housing is quite slim, so it’s unlikely it’ll conflict with other motherboard components. On the base, there’s a massive copper contact plate, with a nice thick block on it, which should give us excellent coverage on the CPU and help easily dissipate heat throughout the liquid.

The aluminium radiator has a very tidy looking design, with neatly finished edges that give it a nice premium quality look and feel.

Cooler Master is using their new fin design here too, instead of the V layout we usually see, the fins are tightly packed squares, giving us even more surface area to dissipate heat from the radiator. Another cool feature is that this radiator has dual fan fittings. It comes with 2 x 140mm fans, but can support to more fans for push/pull, and even comes with the screw holes to mount 120mm fans if that’s what you wish to do, giving you plenty of options on how you configure your cooling setup.