Cooler Master Masterliquid Maker 92: A Unique Twist For A Unique Audience

The Cooler Master Masterliquid Maker 92 is more a mouthful of words, information technology is a very interesting and unique cooling solution. A quick glance at the Maker 92 would accept most people scratching their heads wondering just what in the world is going on here and why would anyone bother. And then become really curious about why this bizarre amalgam carries a MSRP of $99. To exist perfectly honest, if you are asking these questions then information technology is likely not the product you are looking for. I don't mean that in whatsoever negative terms, only the truth is yous might be better served by another cooler. Only if you instead go to 'where all can I fit this' then it might be something you lot want to wait into. But to get a better understanding of what is going on here allow united states of america dig in a bit deeper.

Packaging is rather straight forward, we see Cooler Masters Maker series design cues follow in this products retail package. Not a lot of fan fair going on inside with just the cooler, instructions, and mounting bracket. Something of note hither is that the Maker 92 only supports intel mounting solutions and comes with the proper mounting supplies for socket 115x and 2022/2011-v3. Now, that'south not to say someone crafty couldn't arrive piece of work on an AMD platform. The Maker 92 also comes with CM Maker Gel TIM and a power/pwm cable for the pump.

The cooler itself is where the interesting design choices come in play. What we have hither is an all in ane air tower rotating to downdraft cooler that simply hasn't been done before. The thought here is to have a fully cocky independent water cooling device that can exercise two things, fit nigh everywhere and offering the ability to cool not merely the CPU but the surrounding motherboard components by existence able to be tilted in such a fashion. The reason this is so important is because in many smaller form factor builds, even when a tradition AIO is used, the motherboard VRMs and Retention often get left with stagnant air and therefor running much hotter than yous would actually be comfortable with.

Even though the overall footprint of this cooling solution is extremely pocket-sized they withal managed to become two 92mm fans in a button/pull arrangement on the mounted swiveling radiator. In order to minimize the height and maintain the swivel role the h2o pump is not mounted to or to a higher place the cold plate, merely rather moved to the tiptop of the radiator housing. A move that I very much like and wouldn't mind seeing implemented on standard AIO coolers in the future. The but trouble with that location is that when installing you will need to run the power cable to the top of the radiator and allow for enough slack if you want to rotate at times, otherwise it is a not issue.

Installation was actually straightforward depending on which type of Intel platform you lot are using. 115x sockets require the backplate to be setup and installed while the socket 2022 diverseness only requires the standoffs to be mounted before securing the cooler to the CPU. This is much easier said than done still as two of the thumbscrews for mounting are located merely under the tubing inlet and outlet on the CPU cake making that office of the installation more ho-hum than it should be. In one case the unit is mounted all that's left is connecting the SATA and PWM cable up and y'all're done. Even with the one consequence with the mounting pattern this ends up being one of the about uncomplicated mounts always.

For those who have concerns with the weight of the cooler, but think information technology weighs even less than the Noctua NH-D15 does without it's fans.

Testing this libation wasn't done in the traditional fashion. I didn't line up several libation and see how they performed, and I didn't hook this up to my i7 6800k in a mid tower instance. I strapped this puppy to my i5 6600k and stuffed information technology into my EVGA Hadron Air example. I put it in quite possibly ane of the worst instance weather condition for a heavy overclock and in a example that simply does non support water cooling. Okay, I know if you modify the case you tin can get an AIO in in that location, but you see where I'yard coming from. For comparative sake when I previously used this setup I had a Libation Main Hyper TX3 EVO cooler and was only able to go the CPU upwardly to 4.2GHz and hitting the same temps while screaming like a banshee as I did with the Maker 92 that was modestly humming along.

mITX Test Arrangement

CPU	Intel Cadre i5 6600k (iv.6GHz at 1.35v)
Motherboard	EVGA Z170 Stinger
Memory	16GB (2x8GB) Team Vulkan DDR4 3000MHz
Graphics Card	NVIDIA GTX 1060 Atomic number 26
Example/PSU	EVGA Hadron Air

In this video we pause things down a flake more and show you this setup running AIDA64 Extreme CPU/FPU/Cache stress tests to really put the hurt on and see how this libation holds up.

In the end I have to admit I was a bit impressed with this libation, installation headaches bated I was pleased to see that I was now able to get a healthy overclock with acceptable cooling in such a pocket-sized space. I volition say that while I feel the asking price of $99 is fair enough for this unique of a production, information technology should simply be considered by those who tin accept advantage of if. There are a lot of bang-up options at this price point, but nothing quite this versatile.