Aigo Serac T240 AIO Liquid Cooler Review – Bigger radiator, better heat dissipation

We have previously reviewed a 120mm AIO liquid cooler from Aigo, the Aigo Serac T120, which offered pretty decent cooling performance at an affordable price. This time we will be taking a closer look at a higher end model, most probably with better performance in store. Ladies and gentlemen, the Aigo Serac T240.

IMPORTANT: We conducted our tests on a very beastly machine running on an LGA2011 socket CPU which puts the cooler to some serious stress in testing. In an ideal situation, you would probably want to use the Aigo Serac T240 AiO Liquid Cooler on an LGA115X Socket compatible CPU. Our good friends at MnG has provided us with their results for your convenience. Click here to jump to the results.

Unboxing

Aigo Serac T240 box is understandably larger than the T120’s, simply due its 240mm radiator size. On the front, there is nothing except for the Aigo logo on top left, its official website’s URL, product name and three small icons.

At the back, we have the product detail specification but unfortunately, it’s also written in Chinese here. The only thing I could understand is the list of sockets the cooler is compatible with.

We uses all the thermal paste, that’s the reason why it’s missing in this picture

Inside the box, we have the Aigo Serac T240 itself, two 120mm Aigo’s Ring cooling fan with white LED, one syringe of thermal paste, MOLEX power adapter, the product guide and user manual, screws, AMD mounting kit and a plastic backplate. For Intel users, installation will be easier as the mounting kit is pre-installed on the CPU cooler block.

Appearance

The Aigo Serac T240 uses a 240mm radiator with a thickness of 27mm. The flexible rubber tubes are 310mm long, enough for most PC build. The pump power connector is using 3-pin fan header connector.

Its water pump is quite small in size, measuring only 58x58x38mm. It will light up in white when turned on.

The mounting kit for Intel sockets is pre-installed on the pump. It’s removeable, and all you have to do is slide it off the pump. Aigo also provided a plastic backplate for AMD AM3+ and Intel LGA 115X sockets.

Aigo provides two cooling fans, the Aigo Ring 120mm fans with white LEDs. Physically it looks similar to the Aigo Eclipse but the Ring version has a higher RPM and better air-flow, up to 88 CFM.

For the baseplate, it uses pure copper for efficient heat transfer. Aigo Serac T240 supports most Intel and AMD sockets, except for the AMD AM4 socket which is still not supported.

Basically, the main difference between the Aigo Serac T120 and T240 is the radiator size, number of fans and of course, the retail pricing.

Installation

The Aigo Serac T240 is going to be tasked with cooling the Intel Core i7 5820K in our bench rig. Installing the Aigo Serac T240 on Intel socket LGA2011 is very easy as it only need four mounting screws on the LGA 2011’s ILM.

After tightening the screws and applying adequate thermal paste, secure the cooler on top of it. Don’t forget to mount the fan on the radiator and connect the fan and pump headers to your motherboard. Installation was very easy with only several simple steps in total. Both the fan and pump emit white light when switched on, perfect for white-themed rigs.

Specification

Cooler Specifications

The Aigo Serac T240’s specifications are pretty similar with the T120. The only main difference is the radiator size which is doubled, providing a much bigger surface area to dissipate heat. The pump operates on 12V and can go up to 3500 RPM. For the tubing, it is 12mm in diameter and 310mm in length.

Fan Specifications

Test Machine

Hardware

Software

Test Methodology

We are testing the Aigo Serac T240 on our official Pokde’s rig. With an Intel Core i7 5820K with a 140W TDP, it can pose a challenge for any cooler to tame the heat output when all the cores are under load. The CPU will be running [email protected] and also overclocked to 4.1 [email protected]. Turbo Boost is disabled and SpeedStep enabled in both BIOS and operating system. For the testing phase, I will also be using three different tools to stress the CPU cores to the max: LinX, Intel XTU and OCCT. The tests are run for an hour each.

Our target is to monitor how high the temperatures can rise during the test. We also monitor closely during the test to check if any thermal throttling happens when the temperature hit the CPU’s Tjmax of 105°C. If it is just a spike there will be no thermal throttling unless it stays at the temperature for a certain period of time. This is just to see the maximum potential of the cooling performance of any CPU cooler. The fan speed settings are left at default. The system runs in an open test bench, with ambient temperatures of 25°C.

After applying new thermal paste, I ran a stress test for 1 hour before letting it sit for more than 12 hours. After the idle period, I stressed it again for 1 hour before shutting down the computer completely for more than 6 hours before I start recording the temperatures.

Performance

On the RealTemp software I manually set the Tjmax at 105°C, and for the results, I picked the maximum reading from HWMonitor. The highest temperature I got with the Aigo Serac T240 is over 103°C (Core #0 and Core #2), while the rest cores are at 96°C when running LinX. Of course, thermal throttling occurred during the stress test but it still manages to complete some tests.

Stock clocks

For the comparison, I picked four other coolers to compare against the Aigo Serac T240. With the i7 5820K running on stock clocks, we can see that the cooling performance on the T240 is much better than the T120. On LinX we can see that the Aigo Serac T240 hit 103°C. But the reading was just a spike on Core #0 and Core #2, no thermal throttling occurred during the stress test, which actually very good.

Overclocked

With the chip switching on and off at a rate of over 4 billion cycles in a single second, it really generates a lot of heat. Even at idle we can see the temperature increased by about 3°C compared to stock clocks. While under load, the difference between overclocked and stock clock is not that different.

Let’s compare the Aigo Serac T240 and T120 head to head. I’m using the results we got when using them to cool our overclocked i7 5820K here. From what we have here, the T240’s idle temperature is cooler compare to the T120. While on load, the result seems similar, actually T120 is suffered from thermal throttling.

Overall the Aigo Serac T240 cooling performance is great. The fans and pump are silent, just like the Serac T120 even though the pump is rated at 3500 RPM, while the fans spin at 2000 RPM.

LGA115X CPU Testing

Our good friends at ModNGo shared their Aigo T240 cooler result to compete with the rest of the AIO brands. This result might give you a better insight on the temperature reading with Intel LGA 115X processor. Considering the price of this cooler, the performance really surprised us as it is competing with some of the much expensive coolers and yet managed to stand very strong! You should also checkout the results of the LGA115X CPU testing of its T120 sibling here.

Recommended CPU:

Intel: LGA 1150, 1151, 1155, 1156, 2011 processors

AMD: AM3+ (except AMD FX 9370, 9590), AM4, FM2+ processors

Recommended form factor:

Mini-ATX, ATX, E-ATX

Conclusion

Aigo Serac T240 performed very well in every stress test, especially in LinX. With the result, I can say it could handle most processors in the market. Unfortunately, Aigo didn’t provide a mounting kit for the AMD AM4 socket. I would recommend Aigo to seriously consider adding AM4 to its list of supported sockets, as we know the new AMD Ryzen CPUs are selling like hot cakes.

The Aigo Serac T240 is priced at RM 289, backed by a 2-year warranty, only RM50 more expensive compared to the Serac T120. For me, the Aigo Serac T240 is a better investment compared to the T120, given that your case has enough space for a 240mm radiator.

I’m very satisfied with the Aigo Serac T240 performance and I believe with a push-pull fan configuration this cooler can achieve even better cooling performance.

After considering all aspect, including packaging, performance and price, I award the Aigo Serac T240 with the Silver Pokdeward.

Thank you Aigo Malaysia for providing us with the sample unit to review.

Where To Buy:

We would like to thank our sponsors for our very own benchmarking rig – The PokdeRig. These companies believe in us and put their trust into what we do. They deserve all the love in the world!

Asus X99-Deluxe

Intel Core i7-5820K

CM MasterAir Pro 4

CM V850 PSU

Sandisk Ultra II

Avexir Blitz 16GB DDR4