Cooler Master Seidon 240M and 12 More Coolers: The Retest and Mega-Roundup
by Dustin Sklavos on April 26, 2013 6:01 AM ESTThe Cooler Master Seidon 240M
It's easy to mistake the Cooler Master Seidon 240M as another Asetek design; apparently Asetek thought it was close enough that it was worth suing Cooler Master over. How that suit pans out remains to be seen, but the Seidon 240M definitely has enough distinctive characteristics to make it worth evaluating on its own.
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Cooler Master may not have been doing well in our recent radiator fan roundups, but the two fans they've included for the Seidon 240M's 240mm radiator appear to be the same breed as the fan they use on the widely loved (and rightfully so) Hyper 212 Evo air cooler. Unfortunately, while the waterblock is copper and of Cooler Master's own design, the radiator uses aluminum fins much like competing units from Asetek and CoolIT, and you'll see later that this does have a tangible negative impact on performance.
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Where Cooler Master beats just about everyone else, though, is in their mounting system. The mount for the waterblock is freakishly simple and secure; there are a pair of brackets that get screwed on to the waterblock (one for AMD and one for Intel), along with an adjustable backplate that comes out of the box ready for LGA 1155/1156. Four screws come up through the mounting holes in the motherboard, and then bolts attach to those. The brackets attached to the waterblock then screw into those bolts. It's actually a very simple design and nowhere near as finicky as Asetek's, CoolIT's, or even Swiftech's.
As for fan control, Cooler Master is a step ahead of Corsair's H90 and H110 coolers: the pump uses a standard 3-pin connector and can be connected to any motherboard fan header, while there's a splitter for the two PWM fans included to use the single CPU fan PWM header on the motherboard. No proprietary software, just clean use of the motherboard's integrated fan control. I honestly prefer this approach to Corsair's Corsair Link software and NZXT's Kraken Control, but your mileage may vary.
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Edkiefer - Friday, April 26, 2013 - link
really nice review with air cooler verse the water coolers . One comment though, looking at the air temps of PWM and 100% . They seem so close I would think you should get better results on 100% fan . Maybe the case still doesn't have good airflow for air coolers ?Just saying, I have the hyper evo and with stock MB fan profile verse modified (maxes to about 80% ) I say a least few c with app like prime95 .
biostud - Friday, April 26, 2013 - link
You could do a nice xy diagram with noise and delta temp on the axes.truprecht - Friday, April 26, 2013 - link
"You could do a nice xy diagram with noise and delta temp on the axes."Yes this 100x. It's so obvious - why is it not SOP for cooler comparisons?
DanNeely - Friday, April 26, 2013 - link
I put one together for a prior cooler review; it wasn't nearly as useful as a I hoped. With very few exceptions everything bunched up in a fairly narrow diagonal line.Noise is vertical; temp horizontal: http://orthogonaltonormal.com/midden/fans.png
JCheng - Friday, April 26, 2013 - link
DanNeely: On the contrary, I find that extremely helpful! Having to jump back and forth between the data points and the legend is kind of a drag, but to see the two dimensions really helps!DanNeely - Monday, April 29, 2013 - link
The reason I felt it was of limited value was that excepting some really bad performers on the quiet end of the range (designed for low power CPUs in SFF systems?) almost all the coolers fell along a relatively narrow horizontal line; meaning the best to worst ordering in the temp and noise tables was mostly equal with no major outliers.nail076 - Monday, April 29, 2013 - link
I agree, an X-Y chart of these values would better show the best performers in a sea of coolers.buhusky - Friday, April 26, 2013 - link
Why do fan & cooler reviews NEVER put the OEM fan/cooler numbers in there as a baseline? Never! It would be much better for me to compare to see how different of an upgrade the item(s) would be compared to what came with my stuff, not just as compared to each other....A5 - Friday, April 26, 2013 - link
The OEM coolers are terrible. They would make the graphs unreadable because all the aftermarket stuff would hardly look any different compared to the OEM cooler.matagyula - Friday, April 26, 2013 - link
In this case I don't think the OEM solution would keep the CPU cool enough -> i7 @4,4GHz, as written on the "Testing methodology" page.