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.

AIO Cooler	Fan Configuration	Radiator Thickness	Water block height
Corsair H100i Elite LCD Display	2x 120mm	27mm	57mm
Enermax Aquafusion Adv 240 White	2x 120mm	27mm	54.5 mm
Enermax Aquafusion Adv 360 Black	3x 120mm	27mm	54.5 mm
Corsair H100I Capellix XT	2x 120mm	27mm	49 mm
Lian Li Galahad II Trinity SL-INF 360	3x 120mm	27mm	67mm
Lian Li Galahad II Trinity Performance 360	3x 120mm	32mm	67mm
Enermax LIQMAXFLO 360	3x 120mm	38mm	70mm

 

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.

Noise Testing	50% Fan Speed	100% Fan Speed	Under Load
Corsair H100i Elite LCD Display	35.9	46	45.9
Enermax ETS-F40-FS ARGB	32.1	37.2	37.2
Enermax Aquafusion Adv 240 White	38.6	50.5	42.1
Enermax Aquafusion Adv 360 Black	39.8	52.4	45.1
Corsair H100I Capellix XT	33.4	46.1	40.8
Enermax Aquafusion Adv 360 Black Retest	39.8	52.4	41.8
Lian Li Galahad II Trinity SL-INF 360	32.5	41.1	34.4
Lian Li Galahad II Trinity Performance 360	39.5	56.8	40.8
Enermax LIQMAXFLO 360	32.4	41.8	31.4

 

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.