This past June I finally caught up with Enermax, checking out their Aquafusion Adv coolers, and was impressed with their performance. Well, today they have introduced their latest AIO cooler lineup, the LIQMAXFLO AIO Series which has an integrated VRM cooling fan on top of their pump/waterblock to help with cooling your VRM which can be an issue when you don’t have additional cooling through your case. The LIQMAXFLO lineup has a standard 27 mm radiator thickness model with their LIQMAXFLO SR models and then the LIQMAXFLO that we have in to test today which has a thicker 38mm radiator which is thicker even than the 32mm Lian Li Galahad II Trinity Performance that I previously took a look at. So I’m excited to see how that affects performance.

Product Name: Enermax LIQMAXFLO 360

Review Sample Provided by: Enermax

Written by: Wes Compton

Amazon Affiliate Link: HERE

Packaging and Accessories

The box for the LIQMAXFLO 360 has red trim on the top and bottom of the top of the front of the box with the rest in black. They have the LIQMAXFLO branding in the largest font and with the cooler size just below that. The Enermax logo is up in the top left corner and they have badges in the top right that show that the cooler works with both the AM5 socket and LGA 17000 Sockets from Intel. The rest of the front has a picture of the cooler with all three fans on the radiator and the fan on top spinning and lit rendered with RGB lighting to show the potential lighting. The back of the box has a specification listing on the left and a few detailed pictures of the cooler. One picture has all of the components pulled apart for the pump and waterblock including the fan on top, a second picture shows how that fan pulls air and blows out the sides to cool VRM heatsinks and your memory. They also highlight the thicker radiator design. The end of the box has a line drawing that shows all of the radiator and pump dimensions and has all of the icons showing the software that can control the RGB on the cooler. Overall Enermax does a great job of showing you pictures of what you are getting and giving you all of the information you might need if you were shopping in a store, no googling needed.

The top/front of the box lifts up and opens up and right up on top you will find the instructions so you can dive into those before anything else. Under that and on top of everything else you have a layer of foam. Then inside is a formed cardboard tray that has a spot for each component keeping everything safe. Each thing comes in a plastic bag and the radiator also has a cardboard cover on it as well to avoid damage.

The manual is all black and white and each page has line drawings. Where most companies will have a section for AMD and then one for Intel Enermax starts the first page with the first step for both and walks you through step by step then the bottom half of each page has instructions across 13 different languages so everything is covered.

For accessories, you get two bags. One bag has the RGB controller and the cables for that, the other bag is a lot larger and has everything else inside. That larger bag has both the AMD and Intel pump brackets as well as the backplate for Intel use. You have two cables, one has the proprietary fan connection and hooks into your PWM fan plug as well as an addressable RGB plug. That cable also has an output for the pump connection as well. The second cable is a SATA power to fan connection if you want the fans running at full speed. The small baggies split up the mounting components and they all have their use printed on them. There are bags for Intel and AMD use as well as Intel’s larger sockets. There is a bag with black screws for mounting the fans to the radiator as well as the radiator to your case. Then one universal bagie which has the spring-loaded mounting nuts and the older Intel socket hardware as well. Last up there are three hose clips/combs. These clip onto the water lines and keep them spaced out perfectly.

I didn’t find this until I was pulling the whole cooler out because it was buried down below everything but there was a third bag of accessories included with the LIQMAXFLO 360 and this is the most interesting of them all. This one is labeled as a maintenance kit and it comes with a few things. There is a 24-pin plug that will jumpstart your PC without putting power to the motherboard. I’ve used these with custom water cooling in the past but I like that this also has a fan plug coming off of it so you can plug the pump in. There is thermal paste and then a bottle of coolant. The bottle has a pointed tip to make it easy to top off the coolant level in the LIQMAXFLO 360 radiator. A lot of AIO coolers eventually lose enough coolant to get a big air bubble and cause pumps to fail as well as performance issues, it's great to see Enermax acknowledging that and including the tools to help prevent it in the future.

Photos and Features

Before diving into the features of the LIQMAXFLO 360 I did want to run through the models available from Enermax with the LIQMAXFLO lineup because the LIQMAXFLO 360 that I have here for testing is just one of their models. The lineup has six models models in total with those being split up between the LIQMAXFLO and LIQMAXFLO SR models. The LIQMAXFLO SR has the same RGB pump design as the LIQMAXFLO lineup but has a standard 27 mm radiator thickness and comes with non-RGB fans. The LIQMAXFLO lineup on the other hand has a thicker 38mm radiator, RGB fans, and is also available in different sizes. The LIQMAXFLO SR comes in one, two, and three 120mm fan configurations whereas the LIQMAXFLO, with its performance focus skips the single fan design and is available in two and three 120mm fan configurations then one random 420 triple 140mm fan setup. I’m surprised they don’t also have a dual fan version on the 140 mm fan model as well.

Our LIQMAXFLO 360 comes with three 120mm fans and they have the model name UCSFARGB12P-LMF, this isn’t a model that Enermax sells currently and none of their listed fans look similar at all. It’s always nice when you can buy additional fans to match everything up. Officially the model name is their ARGB Silent Flow Fan, so I’m hoping we see them come out in the future. They can run between 500 RPM and 1800 RPM. They have a black housing which has rubber vibration pads on the corners and then white translucent fan blades which are lit up with the addressable RGB lights in the center housing. They have five blades that wrap around and then the front center cap has the Enermax logo on it. What is really unique about these though is their wiring, they have two sets of wiring that run from the center of the fan out and then it is all combined into a compact 8-pin connection which has two missing pins meaning it is only using 6 connections. Each fan has two plugs, one male and one female and the cable length goes just past the end of the fan. The idea here is that each fan can be plugged into each other daisy chaining them together for clean simple wiring. It isn’t as clean and simple as Lian Li’s Uni-Fan design but it does clean up the wiring significantly which is one of the main downsides to RGB fans.

One of the big upgrades for the LIQMAXFLO 360 over the SR model and almost every other AIO cooler is the radiator being 38 mm thick. We saw with this Lian Li’s new performance model as well and I’m excited to see all-in-one coolers moving beyond the “standard” configuration and looking to edge out more performance from more than just the pump/block design. The radiator on the LIQMAXFLO 360 has three 120 mm fan mounts and is all black. The end caps are both squared off which I think looks a little more modern than the older rounded endcap style you see sometimes. The fin density isn’t any different than a standard AIO radiator where the Lian Li performance model did increase there. They then have the LIQMAXFLO branding etched into the side and painted in white. The two water lines have black sleeving on them and then on the opposite end from the lines, there is a screw in the endcap where you can open the radiator up and top the coolant level off in the future. The hose end of the radiator has a serial number sticker and a sticker with the importer information on it for France and Germany.

In addition to the pump being on top of the waterblock, like most AIO coolers. The LIQMAXFLO 360 also has a 60 mm fan mounted to the top. The fan has the same addressable RGB lighting as the radiator fans to tie all of that together and for cooling this fan is designed to block air down and out the sides of the pump housing to get airflow onto the VRMs or VRM heatsinks around the CPU socket as well as your memory. One of the main downsides to going with water cooling over an air cooler is that those areas end up with less cooling. With power draw getting higher and higher with the current generation CPUs, this has become more and more important. The pump itself has a dual chamber design which is used to increase the pump pressure and flow. The pump is Enermax’s first PWM pump design and it runs between 1200 RPM and 3000 RPM. The fan on top maxes out at 3000 RPM as well but can run slower on the low end, down to 500 RPM. The fan cover is removable and is held in place with magnets and can be flipped around to line the Enermax branding on top depending on your build's orientation. The pump with the fan and cover on top is very tall for an AIO cooler at 70 mm in total height and for wiring, it has the 4-pin PWM fan header which controls the pump and VRM fan then a three-wire addressable RGB cable that can daisy chain in line with the fan cable to plug into the included controller or your motherboards aRGB header. The big gaps on the sides in the squared-off design are where air flows out from the VRM fan and the wires come out in between the two water lines which have a right-angled swivelable connection on the side of the pump. The base is copper and has a visible texture to it, not a mirrored finish. The water block comes with thermal paste pre-installed in a hexagram shape which helps eliminate that step from the installation.

Test Bench

Fitment, Noise Testing, and Lighting

Installing the LIQMAXFLO 360 is similar to the last Enermax AIO cooler that we had in the office. For our Intel LGA 1700 installation, you get a metal backplate as well as the bracket that slides onto the pump and clicks into place. The backplate has standoffs that are specific to the LGA 1700 which have to be installed in the correct orientation and then they have plastic washers that slide on top of the bracket to hold things in place. That goes into your motherboard from the back, then you have four taller plastic standoffs that space out the cooler from the CPU. These can also help hold things in place but it does depend on which way you install them. If you do it wrong the backplate will need to be held from the back when you install the pump and even with them installed and holding it in place you have to be very careful. The pump goes on top (remember to remove the plastic cover) and has thermal paste pre-installed then you have four nuts with a grip on the side to be installed by hand and Phillips on top to be tightened with a screwdriver. Those have springs built in to help regulate the pressure.

You will need to install the three fans with the included screws and Enermax includes a set of shorter screws to mount the radiator to your case. I would love to see the fans come pre-installed, more coolers are starting to do that and it makes installation a lot easier but I didn’t have any trouble with installing the fans and this time around the fans didn’t feel like they were going to break when the screws put a little pressure on them. Wiring the fans is easy with the proprietary 8-pin daisy chain connection. You then have an included cable that hooks up to the last fan and that you hook to your PWM fan header and motherboard addressable RGB or the included RGB controller.

Fitment for the LIQMAXFLO 360 is going to be a little different than your average AIO cooler. It does have a thicker radiator which was thicker than the Lian Li Galahad II Trinity Performance even. The pump design with the fan on top is also the tallest of all of the recent AIO coolers we have tested. None of that is going to be an issue in any larger case, but if you start getting into more compact cases, you might want to make sure you have room. The main area of concern would be if you mount it above the motherboard to the top of a case, some of those have gotten used to the “standard” AIO radiator thickness, and in any SFF case, the pump height could be an issue.

To start my performance testing I have run a few different noise tests. Our test configuration is on an open-air test bench and the decibel meter was setup 18 inches away aimed between the pump and radiator. I tested at 50% fan speed and 100% fan speed to get an idea of overall noise levels then I also tested what the noise level is under load which uses AIDA64’s stress test with the CPU workload and the stock fan profile which in this case was using the fan profile for the Asus motherboard on our test bench, in cases where a cooler has its own controller and software this would be the standard or balanced setting. The LIQMAXFLO 360 was surprisingly quiet for a triple fan design with its 50% and 100% fan speed tests doing well. The fan and pump were the loudest component because of their highest pitch. Then when under load the LIQMAXFLO 360 ran at 31.4 decibel which was the quietest cooler tested here.

Last up here I did also check out the lighting for the LIQMAXFLO 360. All of the lighting is built into the cooler's four fans which includes the 60 mm fan on top of the pump and the three 120 mm fans on the radiator. They all have addressable RGB lighting and connect with the standard aRGB 3-pin connection which makes hooking up to your motherboard simple if you want to use your motherboard software to control things. You also have the included in-lin RGB controller which just has buttons that let you flip through a few effects, speeds, and colors. The addressable lighting means that the fans can have solid colors or any number of colors running all at once across the fan which creates a nice blend as the fan spins as you can see in the pictures below. Overall the lighting is bright and does a good job, the pump lighting goes perfectly with the fan lighting and because of this design, Enermax isn’t backlighting any branding which I’m not a fan of.

Cooling Performance

For cooling performance, I installed the Enermax LIQMAXFLO 360 up to our test bench and ran a few different tests to get a look at its performance in a few different situations. Our test configuration by default runs with the Intel i9-13900K with its PL1 and PL2 set to 253 watts and 307A overall. This keeps these tests consistent and doesn’t have the CPU just ramping up almost endlessly which would just show the CPU running at a high temperature for every possible cooler. My first test was with AIDA64’s Stress Test using the FPU workload which is extremely demanding and very similar to what you would see when running rendering workloads. I tested the LIQMAXFLO 360 with the stock fan profile on our Asus motherboard and again at 100% fan speed. With that we could see that the LIQMAXFLO 360 does have some headroom left if you need to crank the fans up, it went from 65c down to 61c at 100% fan speed. The overall results did still have a few coolers running cooler, especially on the stock fan profile test where a few AIOs have their own fan controller and are a little more aggressive on their fan profile but the 100% fan speed test does show that the Trinity Performance 360 did still run a little cooler with its higher slowing fans and denser fins on the radiator.

I ran the same FPU workload, but this time going in and uncapped the PL2 and amperage and this test was done at 100% fan speed. Here I wasn’t looking at temperatures at all, every cooler tested is going to be completely maxed out. I was just watching the CPU wattage readings after running the test until they leveled off. The LIQMAXFLO 360 ended up at 301 watts which was in line with the other 360 mm AIO coolers but the Trinity Performance was still a step above.

My last test is the CPU workload with the AIDA64 Stress Test and this is a more realistic workload that compares to 100% CPU load when gaming and other everyday tasks. These are a lot lower than the FPU workload results. The LIQMAXFLO 360 was a little warm with the stock fan profile but wasn’t too bad at 100% fan speed which is in line with what we saw on the noise tests earlier.

Overall and Final Verdict

With our testing out of the way, we can step back and put it all together. Enermax’s new all-in-one cooler lineup is a step in a different direction from what I have seen from them in the past. The Enermax LIQMAXFLO 360 has an integrated fan on top designed to bring airflow back into the area around your CPU to help keep your VRMs running cooler and with CPUs pulling as much power as they do these days that is important. The fan also has addressable RGB lighting which matches up with all of the fans and gives you the flexibility to match the cooler with your build or go crazy with the lighting if that is your thing. Beyond that Enermax included a maintenance kit with the cooler, a welcome change that brings attention to the fact that AIO coolers do lose coolant over time and this leads to bad performance and pumps failing. They also went with a unique wiring setup for their fans which daisy chains them all together and simplifies the wiring which can be a huge mess with RGB fans. It isn’t to the level of some of the linking fan designs like the Uni-Fans which get rid of the wiring between the fans altogether, but it isn’t far off with a simple connection. I was hoping to see performance a step above similar coolers with the thicker radiator but the performance ended up being right in line with other triple fan coolers. The Enermax LIQMAXFLO 360 did however stand out when it came to noise levels, especially when under load. Enermax also is offering a lot of flexibility with their new LIQMAXFLO lineup with a wide range of sizes including a larger triple 140 mm cooler and even more options with the Enermax LIQMAXFLO SR line which has a standard radiator thickness and no RGB on the fans.

The pump design with an integrated fan does mean that the pump/block is taller than other AIO coolers. That isn’t an issue in most situations, but in SFF builds it can be. The thicker radiator can also cause fitment issues in some cases so you will need to be careful with that. Beyond that, I wouldn’t mind a few small changes to simplify the installation, to add on to the time saved with the daisy-chained wiring. Pre-installed fans would be awesome and I have been seeing some coolers have that now. The pump bracket design which works well could use a better way to hold the bracket in place when you don’t have the pump installed, having to hold it from behind when putting the pump on would be a lot easier with a third hand.

For pricing, Enermax isn’t aiming for the highest-end market like Lian Li is with their performance model, which is good because that cooler is still a step ahead in cooling performance (not so much on the noise though). The Enermax LIQMAXFLO 360 that I tested today has an MSRP of $134.99 but it is selling on Newegg for $129.99. This is a little more than what their Aquafusion Adv coolers are selling for right now and aesthetically I do prefer the fan design on those more. But the pricing is in line with what you would expect for a 360 mm addressable RGB cooler with the RGB controller included. Having the VRM cooling is just a nice bonus on top of that. This is a nicer setup than the In Win BR36 which has VRM cooling and is a lot less than the Asus Ryujin coolers which also have VRM cooling.

Live Pricing: HERE

Author Bio

Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org

Editor-in-chief

You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.