jmke

For builders looking to cool a hot-clocked CPU like Intel's Core i7-6700K, tower-style coolers and closed-loop liquid coolers come with tradeoffs. Go with the tower-style air cooler, and you might need a 170-mm tall monster with multiple 140-mm fans to keep your system cool and quiet. Choose a liquid cooler, and you have to find a place for a huge radiator stack to exhaust its waste heat or hope that your case's airflow is otherwise good enough to move that hot air out. Liquid coolers often leave CPU voltage-regulation circuitry at the mercy of fans around the CPU socket, too, and their pump noise can be an annoyance to those with sensitive ears.

Those tradeoffs are hard enough to make in a roomy ATX mid-tower, but builders of high-end systems in compact microATX or Mini-ITX cases might have an especially hard time finding a powerful enough cooler to make their dreams a reality. Often, it's not even possible to fit a big enough air cooler for high-performance builds inside cases like the Corsair Carbide Series Air 240 or the Graphite Series 380T—it's liquid or nothing.


Cooler Master is trying to help those small-form-factor builders out by bringing the best of air and liquid coolers together in one heatsink: the MasterLiquid Maker 92. The concept behind this $100 cooler is so unusual that it doesn't really have its own category yet, so let me explain. The Maker 92 sandwiches a self-contained pump and radiator between a pair of push-pull 95-mm fans. That cooling stack rests atop a bracket that allows the sandwich to rest in a vertical position, like a tower cooler, or in a horizontal one, like a blow-down air cooler. Where the base and heatpipes of a traditional tower-style cooler might go, Cooler Master snaked a pair of coolant hoses down to a low-profile water block with a hefty copper cold plate.

http://techreport.com/review/30897/c...ooler-reviewed

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