Thermaltake Toughliquid Ultra 360 AIO Liquid Cooler Review

Installation

The instruction manual for the Thermaltake Toughliquid Ultra 360 is pretty light in terms of details. In fact, for the Intel 115X socket we use on our test bench, you can literally see all of the instructions you get in the image below. Yep, that’s it. Thankfully though, it honestly didn’t need to be any more detailed than this. While there was no written text, the diagrams were nice and clear meaning that I very quickly understood exactly what I had to do.

And for as little as there is, installation of the Thermaltake Toughliquid Ultra 360 (at least for Intel) is, quite literally, about a three-step process. Sort out the backplate, fit it to the motherboard, install the CPU block.

Mounting

The Thermaltake Toughliquid Ultra 360 comes out of the box with the Intel bracket preinstalled to the CPU block. For AMD users, however, fret yet not. This simply slides out (no screws needed) and you can quickly, within literally seconds, attach your AM4 bracket. It doesn’t get any simpler than this. In addition, thanks to the surprisingly helpful instruction manual (despite not being overly large) I had absolutely no problems whatsoever attaching this to our test bench.

The only mild grumble I had was regarding the cable that fits onto the CPU block to both power and deliver information to and from the display. When installed, the resistance of the cable is only ever so slightly less than the rotational cap. While I didn’t personally have too many problems with this (on a flat test bench) I suspect that this could potentially be annoying to get the ‘right way up’ when fitted inside a conventional mid-tower chassis as you have a pretty strong and not very flexible cable following the twist around.

In other words, I wish the cap was a little more resistant in its rotation. It just turns a little too easily for my personal liking.

Overall Thoughts

The Thermaltake Toughliquid Ultra 360 took us around 10 minutes to install from out of the box and onto our test bench. A really good time, particularly when you consider that at least a third of that was taken up to fit the 12 screws needed for the three cooling fans. Once installed and you have the system running, however, clear attention will always be drawn to that LCD display.

Although coming with around 8 different settings that display various (and useful) system performance or temperature statistics (CPU temperature, GPU temperature, CPU frequency, liquid temperature, CPU load, etc., etc.) as noted earlier in the review, you can also apply custom JPG or GIF images. While it’s perhaps a little disappointing that you can’t (at least as far as I could tell) upload MP4 video files as well, on the whole, whether you choose to go for the hard facts or just want a dancing anime girl, with 20MB of storage to work with, the only real limits are your imagination. Well, that and what you can find available on the internet.

So, the Thermaltake Toughliquid Ultra 360 is fitted, it was easy to do and looks fantastic, but how does it perform? Well, let’s get that CPU fired up and see what happens!