Over the last couple of Years, Thermaltake has been making strides in releasing new and innovative products and bringing good quality and affordable tech to PC consumers. Today, we take a look at one of their top-of-the-line AIO Coolers: Thermaltake Toughliquid 360 ARGB.
When we reviewed the Toughfan 120 kits, we emphasized quite a bit about how these Non-RGB fans are so important even in 2022. We said these fans were meant for radiators, and in Toughliquid Series of coolers, Thermaltake did exactly that, and slapped three of these fans on a triple radiator and called it a day.
But, since we’ve been pitching these Toughfans as Noctua competitors, so it will be interesting to see how the fans perform on a triple radiator.
Packaging and Accessories
The Toughliquid 360 comes in a pretty standard fare packaging. We have a large cardboard box with black and silver accents. The front of the box has a nice large image front and center on the packaging and the back has the usual information.
But, first things first. The review sample that we’ve received has been to places, and by that We mean it’s been used (read abused) by many so-called reviewers before us, and when we received the battered box of the cooler in our hands, we found the proper hardware for mounting the CPU block is missing, which includes (but not limited to) one of the mounting screws (as shown in the picture).
Now, We don’t blame the brand or the distributor, but I do like to address the non-existent fraternity of Indian tech reviewers, to take good care of the samples they get. Like..pretty please?
So, before we show you the performance graphs, and give us our opinions, we must confess, we jerry-rigged this cooler to work with our 5800X, and even with our best efforts, the cooler will definitely perform better with proper mounting hardware and adequate mounting pressure.
Close Look
Out of the box, the Thermaltake Toughliquid 360 ARGB Sync presents itself well with a nice sleek black aesthetic. The length of the hose is generous meaning we can use it in some really big cabinets.
The Block in itself is the standard Asetek Like design (read round heads) with the mounting bracket pre-attached. The head is reflective since this is where all the ARGB goodness happens. We happen to have two ports for the ARGB and power also. Both the ports are set recessed into the CPU block meaning only the flexible part of the cable is exposed.
For those of you who don’t have motherboard support for ARGB, Thermaltake has you covered with three buttons directly on the CPU block. The options are to configure the lighting mode, color pattern, and speed. This is great addition to have although might not be useful for most. The design overall makes sense and is pleasing to the eye.
So, on to the performance charts.
Our open-air test bench is arranged by TukTak – Tech; (check out their YouTube Channel here.). Consists of AsRock B550 Pro4 (with Bios P2.20), Ryzen 7 5800X (with Core Performance Boost Disabled) two sticks of Toughram Z One 8GB (3200 MHz CL16); powering this system is a Cooler Master MWE 650 Bronze V2.
For the synthetic stress tests, we used Cinebench R23 and prime95. This will put enough load on our 8 cores, 16 thread CPU, to put the cooler to some work.
So with the above components and our jerry-rigged cooler, we fired up Cinebench and Prime 95 and the results were pretty refreshing, to say the least. With a moderately toasty ambient of around 28C, the cooler never broke a sweat even with multiple runs of Prime95 the Thermaltake Toughliquid 360 never broke the 61C barrier!
Now, the performance is adequate, as the cooler keeps the CPU temps in the lower to mid-60s. Most people will be very impressed with these temps, but we think with a proper mounting kit, the temps would have been better. But what impressed me is the noise levels. Even with the constant synthetic loads, the fans on the radiators are super quiet, and dead silent.
So we definitely have a winner here folks!
And with proper mounting pressuring, the cooling performance will increase quite a bit, while keeping the noise levels very low. Since the fans can ramp up to 2000 RPM, so there is so much headroom even if your CPU is a bit toasty like a 12900K or KS.
Overall, the Thermaltake Toughliquid 360 ARGB gets a gold award from team TechARX.
It is a no-nonsense cooler where the design makes sense and is aesthetically pleasing; and the total package overall is very competitive.
