Deepcool Captain 240 Liquid CPU Cooler Review

Testing

The test rig consists of the following parts:

Processor: Intel Core i7 3770K
Motherboard: Gigabyte Z77X-UD4H
Video Card: Zotac 560 Ti
Memory: Samsung Green MV-3V4G3D/US – 16GB
Power Supply: Enermax Maxrevo 1350W
Storage: OCZ Vertex 3 240 GB raid 0 Running Windows 7 64bit
Cooling: Deepcool Captain 240
Case: Phanteks Enthoo Luxe

As always testing was done using Intel Burn Test (IBT) with the AVX instruction set. The reason to use this instead of Prime95 with this setup is that it pushes our i7 3770K a whole lot harder. This gives us a better sense of extreme load temps. Most of the testing was done at the max memory setting for a single pass. While admittedly this in no way would qualify the chip as stable while overclocked, it gives us a realistic idea of what temperatures the CPU will be hitting. Additionally we are going to run 3DMARK Fire Strike Extreme to give you a realistic idea of performance while gaming.

Our baseline was established using a bequiet! Dark Rock Pro 2 with the 3770K on stock settings:

Ambient temps: 22.22C/72F
Idle temps: 38.75C/101.75F core average
IBT temps one pass max memory: 63.5C/146.3F core average

The first thing we did was to test the cooler with stock motherboard/CPU settings:

Ambient temps: 23.33°C/74°F
Idle temps: 32.5°C/90.5°F core average
IBT temps one pass max memory: 62°C/143.6°F core average

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As you can see the cooler is much better than our baseline air cooler at idle. Unfortunately the gap between them narrows quite a bit under a heavy load. It’s not looking great for the Captain 240 at this point but we went ahead and threw on a decent 4.5ghz overclock and got to testing.

Here are our results for our i7 3770K @ 4.5ghz with 1.248V vCore:

Ambient temps: 23.33°C/74°F
IBT temps: 86.5°C/°F with one core hitting 90°C!

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Truth be told this cooler went a little bit past our comfort zone. If it had ticked of just one more degree we would have had to abandon the test and downclock. As it is it should be fine during a gaming session as nothing really pushes a processor like IBT. So we went ahead and ran 3DMARK to see how it holds up.

Ambient temps: 23.33°C/74°F
3DMARK: 66.5°C/151.7°F with one core hitting 68°C

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With temps in the mid to upper 60’s the cooler does it’s job of keeping your CPU cool enough to game on at a decent overclock. Again I have to say the results are not impressive in the slightest. For a 240mm AiO we would have expected temperatures to me much cooler than what we have here. After adjusting for the difference in ambient temperatures we find that the Captain 240 is 12°C warmer under load at 4.5ghz than our current performance champion the Corsair H110i GT. The results for the Captain 240 are more what we would expect from a lower end 120mm radiator AiO.

One positive performance note is that the Captain is quite the quiet operator. The entire time both the fans and the pump remained at a nice low volume which is really nice. We also really like the pulsing red glow that comes from an LED in the top of the pump. It would have been nice however to be able to change the LEDs color.

Deepcool Captain 240 Liquid CPU Cooler Deepcool Captain 240 Liquid CPU Cooler