As a small-form factor enthusiast, I’ve been building HTPCs for a few years, relying on my Playstation 4 for any gaming needs, but I recently sold it and have decided to move to PC gaming, and as such have started to consider liquid cooling. Could I get better results than regular air-cooling, at a reasonable price point? MSI kindly donated the CoreLiquid 360R (I don’t know about you, but it took me a few weeks of seeing that word before I worked out that it was Core – liquid, not Co – reliquid) for me to see if I can eke out any improvements.
My standard gaming setup wasn’t quite right for this – firstly, my i5 10500, while helping me towards 100+ fps at QHD at full settings in modern games like Call of Duty: Warzone, only has a TDP of 65W, not really tasking any proper cooling setup. Secondly, my case, the NCase M1, can only fit a 120mm radiator. Fortunately, I’ve been looking at expanding my inventory anyway. Here’s my test setup:
Case: DeepCool E-shield
Motherboard: MSI B75IA
CPU: i5 3570k
RAM: 2x 8Gb Crucial Ballistix DDR3 1600MHz
Storage: 500 Gb Samsung 850 Evo
GPU: Asus Strix 1070
PSU: Corsair TX550M
OS: Windows 10
Monitor: LG 27” QHD IPS
Thermal Paste: Arctic MX-4
I’m not experienced or skilled at overclocking so I set the MSI UEFI to auto-overclock – it being eight-year old tech, we shouldn’t expect much improvement, recent auto-overclocking software using AI. The auto-overclocking software requires several reboots in order to settle down and find it’s target so care was taken to make sure it was happy and stable before running each test.
We’ll be using Cinebench R23 to compare four cooling options in total: a No-Fan CR80EH, a funky little passive-cooling set of copper heatpipes that look like an old gramophone, rated to dissipate up to 80W of TDP, where the i5 3570k outputs up to 77W, so we don’t have much headroom there and we’ll expect thermals to be high and performance potentially low as a result, but at least we’ll have no moving parts.
Next up is another AIO, a 120mm Corsair H55, second-hand but in seemingly good shape, acquired alongside the i5 3570k and motherboard as a bundle. The regular fan has been replaced with a Noctua NF12-SB. Noteworthy is that neither of these cooling options come with RGB at all, indicating my preference for a cleaner look.
The object of the review, the MSI CoreLiquid 360R, is next. Pcpartpicker lied in telling me that the 360mm radiator would fit in the DeepCool E-shield, but without a hearty Dremelling, or installing the radiator vertically behind the front panel – severely limiting it’s cooling power – it won’t fit inside the case. Solution? Have it outside the case, on top. This means that any noise won’t be dampened by the case itself, but this case isn’t designed for noise dampening so the loss there will be small. To make it as fair a test as possible, I’ve removed the side panels and the solitary case fan for all the cooling options, and left the Corsair H55 in the same position.
Lastly, a stock Intel cooler – always a good baseline in terms of money, at the very least.