Cooler Master Seidon 240M Water Cooling System Review

Testing
The test rig consists of the following parts:

Processor: Intel Core i5 2500K
Motherboard: ASUS P8P67 EVO
Video Card: SPARKLE Calibre Series X480 GeForce GTX 480
Memory: Corsair Vengence 8 GB @ 1600mhz
Power Supply: High Power Astro PT 700w
Storage: OCZ Vertex 2 120 GB Running Windows 8 64bit
Cooling: Cooler Master Seidon 240M
Case: Nanoxia Deep Silence 1

Testing was done using Intel Burn Test (IBT) with the AVX instruction set. The reason I use this instead of Prime95 with this setup is that it pushes our i5 2500K a whole lot harder, giving us a better sense of load temps. Most of the testing was done at the high memory setting for a single pass. While admittedly this in no way would qualify the chip as stable when overclocking, it gives us a realistic idea of what temps it will be hitting.

Here are our stock cooler results in the test rig:

Ambient temps: 22.22C/71.99F
Idle temps: 31.25C/88.25F core average
IBT temps: 78.5C/173.3F core average

Next I ran the Seidon 240M through the exact same test at the same motherboard settings:

Ambient temps: 23.33C/74F
Idle temps: 32.75C/90.95F core average
IBT temps: 49.0C/120.2F core average

Cooler Master Seidon 240M Water Cooling System Cooler Master Seidon 240M Water Cooling System

Looking at these results and some of our past results we see an interesting trend in that under idle at stock settings these AIO coolers actually perform worse than the Intel provided cooler. Loads temps of course are much better.

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But you don’t come here to find out if a $99 cooler is better than the one that came with your processor now did you? Let’s see how this 240mm radiator cools while running our CPU at some high overclocks:

Ambient temps: 23.33C/74.00F
Max overclock: 4.9 ghz/1.472V vCore
IBT temps: 74.5C/166.1F core average

Cooler Master Seidon 240M Water Cooling System

I have to say I really tried to get to 5.0ghz with this cooler. Looking at the results at 4.9ghz I was sure that I would be able to do it. Unfortunately once I started nearing 1.5V on the core this cooler just couldn’t keep up. I aborted a couple of runs that hit 89 C before I stopped them and anything less on the core would just lock up the rig.

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So no 5.0 ghz club for this cooler, but is it so bad really? I think not. This cooler did a solid 4.9ghz and only had a max core of 79 C (highest single core temp reading)! Very nice.

As usual though I have to be the kill-joy. This overclock was achieved at the cost of my hearing. Looking at the screenshot you can see the fans were blasting along at a massive 2335 rpm (though slightly shy of their claimed top speed of 2400rpm). I’m having a hard time finding the best word to describe the noise coming from our “silent” case. Boisterous, booming, deafening…no, tumultuous! At any rate, it was very very loud.

Another thing that I ran across while testing was the blue LED that is imbedded in the semi clear smoky top of the pump. It’s not terribly bright however it is blue. And if you are doing any type of a theme or color coordinated effort with your rig and it does not involve blue lighting this is a problem. It is of course functional in that it tells you the pump is running. However many times form does trump function and is something to consider.