Fractal Lumen S24 RGB AIO Liquid Cooler Review

Installation

As we have often said in our prior cooler reviews, having a good quality manual can either make or break (often quite literally) a product’s user-friendly status. If you can’t understand how to install it, after all, the chances are clearly much greater than you’re going to do something wrong that may, by proxy, mean that the cooler either doesn’t work or doesn’t work quite as well as it should.

Fortunately, with the Lumen S24 RGB, Fractal provides you with a good quality, and super glossy, product manual.

While it’s exceptionally light on written instructions (and by ‘light’, we mean barely any at all) the diagrams you are provided with are clear, large, and very easy to understand. As such, as long as you’re paying attention, you shouldn’t have any difficulties in understanding exactly what you have to do to fit this cooler onto your system.

Mounting

Given the semi-awkward nature of AIO installation, I was unable to give you any good-quality images of the process itself (I only have one pair of hands!). In terms of the mounting methodology, however, the good news is that, on the whole, it’s very straightforward. As such, from absolute beginner to the experienced user, you shouldn’t have too many problems getting this installed on your system. Note though that I didn’t say ‘successfully’, and there we hit something of a problem.

In terms of it working correctly, while I did get the Fractal Lumen S24 RGB’s there eventually, I’m not going to lie. I did experience a few problems along the way.

Overall Thoughts

So, after that hint, we might as well go into full disclosure regarding the difficulties we had with the Fractal Lumen S24 RGB. I’m not going to mince my words, I had to reinstall the CPU block 4 times before I could get it working correctly. Don’t get me wrong, the PC switched on, but I knew full well as soon as the fans whirred up that something wasn’t quite right (and a check of the CPU temperatures soon confirmed that). – So, what went wrong? Well, the short version is, I don’t know. I used the same methodology (as per the manual) each time and kept getting the same results, high fan speeds, and unusually high CPU temps (a pretty firm indicator that something isn’t happy). So on the 4th attempt, I tried something different. Against all my prior knowledge, experience, and instincts, for this go, I didn’t fit the CPU block down quite as tightly as I had done with the other unsuccessful efforts. – And with this simple change, it worked perfectly.

Now, this might have just been a quirk. It was even perhaps me not quite getting something right. After installing and testing over 150 coolers during my time here at eTeknix though, I doubt it.

With this in mind though, from out of the box and onto our test bench (and working correctly), it took me around 30-45 minutes to fit the Fractal Lumen S24 RGB. A time frame that is at least triple the average I usually see. In fairness though, the vast majority of this time was required in the reinstallations of the CPU block I had to undertake.

The installation method isn’t difficult. It’s honestly about on par with all other ‘good’ methodologies I’ve encountered in the past. If you do, however, go to install this on your PC, I would perhaps recommend an early check of your CPU temperatures, and, if they’re on the rather high side, try what I did. If things don’t appear as you expected, as mad as this sounds, give those screws on the CPU block a little anti-clockwise turn. As it did for me, it might solve your issues as well!

Putting those troubles to one side though, we got it on and working correctly. So how well does it perform? Well, there’s only one way to find out. Let’s get that CPU working and see what happens in our results!