120mm Water Cooler Round Up w/ Cooler Master, Scythe and Zalman

120mm Water Cooler Round Up

It is no secret that Intels new 4th generation Core ‘Haswell’ processors run a tad warm and that most enthusiasts are looking for better cooling solution for their system. Most will go with traditional air cooling, where a few will want to move up to water cooling.

In the realm of water there are two schools of thought: sealed loop and full on custom. Mostly which way you go is usually dictated by budget. With full on custom you are buying every component for the loop, assembling it yourself and costing fair bit of money in the process. With sealed loop everything comes in a box as a single unit, pretty much installed in a similar fashion as traditional air coolers and costing on average less than $70 for 120mm units.

Today we are looking at four 120mm sealed liquid cooling loop kits. Kits like these have been around for while as we first saw the Asetek LCLC at IDF 2006! The first sealed loop unit I personally reviewed was the CoolIT Systems Pure way back in 2008, and since I have reviewed several units from Corsair, CoolIT Systems, Intel, Thermaltake and Antec. The coolers we are looking at today come from Cooler Master, Scythe, and Zalman. These are all new brands to us when it comes to liquid cooling, so we can’t wait to see what they have to offer. To keep things fair we will go in alphabetical order.

• Cooler Master Seidon 120M — $60.99
• Scythe APSALUS II 120 – $88.99 (Japan Only Product)
  
• Zalman LQ315 — $93.19
• Zalman Reserator 3 MAX $129.99

We will start by looking at each cooler individually, again, in alphabetical order. So we will start with the Cooler Master Seidon 120M.