The Antec Mercury 360 AIO CPU Liquid Cooler - Size does matter!!
Antec has been a main stream player in the PC hardware industry for almost three decades now with a wide catalogue of products including AIOs and PSU. Their PSUs have been ground breaking and heavily trusted upon by enthusiasts and general consumers alike complimented by the lowest return rate in the industry! Talking about AIO Liquid Coolers, Antec started their lineup of AIOs with the H2O liquid coolers a few years back and now they've come up with their latest and refreshed lineup of Mercury AIO CPU Liquid coolers. Today thanks to Antec India I not only have a Mercury cooler for review but I have the magnanimous Antec Mercury 360 AIO CPU Liquid Cooler for review on the table!
Priced in at £104 or Rs 8,500 in India the Antec Mercury 360 is as the name suggests a 360mm AIO unit with an all new pump design and three 120mm blue LED fans that are swappable/removable, unlike the H2O series, and are mounted on an aluminum radiator. The Mercury series coolers come in three sizes namely as 120mm, 240mm and the 360mm that we have today. The new Antec Mercury CPU Cooler Series is engineered to keep the CPU cool for up to 50,000 hours and are also backed by the Antec five-year warranty period.
Note - Antec has also released a RGB lineup of the Mercury cooler which technically are identical to the normal Mercury coolers such as the one we have today but just feature Asus Aura Sync compatible RGB pump and fans instead of the static blue ones.
What's in the Box!?
We get the Mercury 360 in a big cardboard box which is quite heavy and sturdy considering the weight that it contains within which is a very good sign keeping safety in mind during transit. It is mainly white with hues of blue and a black background on top with the product image imprinted along with the Mercury 360 written boldly and proudly. At the bottom you also find all the features and specifications briefly highlighted by graphical representations.
Inside the box we have everything securely resting in plastic bags and covers nestled inside a molded cardboard frame for extra cushioning and organized packing. For a heavy and big unit such as this I'm really happy with the sturdy packing material that Antec chose to go with.
Laying out all the contents on the table and we see that its a lot of stuff and I mean a lot of tiny stuff that you can easily lose and then repent for! Inside the box Antec has placed the Mercury 360 radiator with its three 120mm blue LED PWM fans along with their mounting screws and washers, eSATA to mini USB power connector, 3pin to triple 4pin fan adapter, a big tube of thermal paste, a multi lingual installation and warranty guide and all the necessary mounting hardware for Intel platforms including the LGA2011 socket and for AMD platforms including the very latest AM4 socket. Sadly this cooler is not compatible with AMD Threadripper CPUs and has no TR4 brackets. I'm a bit disappointed with this since a latest 360mm AIO such as this should be compatible with Threadripper as it has all the potential to keep those chips cool.
Let's take a Closer Look!
The Antec Mercury 360 is a lot different from its predecessors and features a more conventional pump-radiator-fan arrangement with detachable fans and big pump that's entirely different both in terms of design and technology.
Starting from the pump itself we have a LED backlit Antec logo on top of the unit which changes color with respect to the temperature of the CPU. The pump is is made out of carbon metal and is wrapped by a white plastic enclosure to damp the noise and also probably to make it look brighter with white. This is their new silent design which has a three-phase motor pump featuring a ceramic axis with graphite bearings to produce water pressure of 2.3 meters with a flow rate of 3.5 liters per minute. This on paper is very impressive and should be there not to bottleneck the huge 360mm radiator that its connected to.
The pump also has a mini USB port on one side and it draws power from here only via the provided micro USB to SATA connector, its an old technique that Antec has been carrying forward from their older AIOs. Not a huge fan of this but if you have a SATA connector to spare from your PSU ,which most of us have, then its a good approach to shed the load off the motherboard fan connectors without compromising upon the pump's performance.
The pump has a copper base which comes covered by a plastic film and no thermal compound is preapplied over here. Upon looking at the copper base-plate we see that it is really clean and smoothly finished and is not an off the mill design which should help in better heat transfer for this unit no doubt.
The tubing on the Mercury 360 is a 330mm long Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) tube which is also Teflon coated for more durability and extra leak protection. These are attached to the pump and radiator quite nicely and can bend at a full 90° to ease the installation process.
Antec has used a aluminum radiator on the Mercury 360 which measure in at 394x119x27 mm and has a high fin density of 16FPI (Fin per Inch) which should be there for a product of this stature. The build quality of this unit is solid and doesn't feel light or flimsy from any angle, support for upto six 120mm fans making a push pull configuration is its big plus point. As for the aesthetics Antec has done nothing odd or out of the world here but just put their logo at one end creating a minimalist design.
We get three 120mm blue LED lit PWM fans with the Antec Mercury 360. These are rated at a maximum speed of 1800RPM with 73.31CFM airflow, 2.25mm H2O static pressure and 30dBA noise. The white ring on the fans are blue LED lit and don't change color but do brighten down or flash at times. As for the noise we see that Antec has added white rubber grommets on all four sides to dampen the noise and vibration that they might originally create.
Time for the fun part - Installation
Over here I'm going to test the Antec Mercury 360 over my Gigabyte X99 Gaming 5P motherboard which is an Intel platform and also can get really hot at times. For this we'll be using all the parts shown in the picture above with the fans all screwed an mounted on top of the radiator securely.
All we need is the power cable for the pump, the fan header extension cable, the thermal compound, the Intel brackets for the pump, screws and stand offs for the LGA2011 socket and retention screws.
In case you plan to use the cooler with any of the other AMD or Intel platform just swap LGA 2011 kit with the Intel or AMD/AMD AM4 backplate and the pump bracket with the AMD/AMD AM4 brackets as everything else would remain the same.
Once ready I'm very much happy with the outcome as the installation is quite simple for any platform for this cooler and infact Antec has eased upon and improved in the installation department of their AIOs which with the H2O series was quite painful at times! Obviously it not the best and needs a few more tweaks and improvements like for example the screw height is a bit too much even when fully tightened when using the LGA 2011 platform for the tube to bend fully on the side and obstructs the path even though the tube can bend at a full 90° which can be improved upon more flexibility and ease especially when someone is installing this or any of the other Mercury series coolers in a tight chassis with less space to work around in.
Let's put it to Test!
For testing the performance of the Antec Mercury 360 we'll be using the following test bench -
CPU: Intel Core i7 5930K
Motherboard: Gigabyte X99 Gaming 5P
RAM: Kingston HyperX Predator 16GB DDR4 3000Mhz
Cooler: Antec Mercury 360
Graphics Card: Gigabyte GTX 1050 Ti G1 Gaming 4GB OC
Storage: Corsair Neutron XTi 480GB
Power Supply: Cooler Master MasterWatt Lite 700
OS: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
Before I move on any further I'd like to mention that as per Antec the LED on the pump is supposed to change colors with respect to the CPU temperatures in the fashion of Blue for less than 48°C, Green for 49°C-60°C and Red for greater than 60°C which however did not happen in my case and the LED was breathing a solid blue color throughout the duration of our tests. Upon researching about it further I came to know that Antec has installed the thermistor inside the head of water cooling which implies that the LED doesn't change color wrt the CPU temperature but wrt the temperature of the coolant flowing through the pump. So even if my CPU was say running at around 65°C for more than half and hour or more the LED changed color to green and not red or something. this also happened only after half and hour or more of consistent high temperatures on the CPU as the coolant doesn't heat up that easily and always remains less than the CPU temperature by around 20°C-25°C.
Coming back to the testing of the cooler firstly, the CPU is kept at stock speeds with boost enabled and temperatures are measured both at idle and at full load. Then we overclock our Intel i7 5930K to 4.5Ghz at 1.75v which is a bit more than what my chip requires to reach that frequency but I had to add some extra heat to it, the same process as that for the stock speed testing is repeated. Temperature is measured using HW monitor with an average being taken of the temperatures recorded on all six cores. MSI Kombuster utility is what I prefer to stress test the CPU at all twelve threads, I run it for a good 15 minutes before recording the temperatures since by then the temperatures reach a saturation point.
Secondly, the pump is plugged directly into the SATA connector while the fans are plugged into the motherboard fan header via the provided fan extension cable. Fan profile was kept at default from the BIOS itself to rule out any discrepancy whatsoever.
The readings would be shown in delta temperature that is after subtracting the ambient temperature of the room while noise levels are recorded from a distance of three feet from the cooler which is a reasonable and practical distance for such tests.
Temperature wise we can see that the Antec Mercury 360 does a fabulous job for a 360mm AIO cooler especially at overclocked frequencies where its massive size comes into play. Considering my ambient temperature is high and the fan profiles are set to default I'm sure if you set the fan speeds to full or to performance in a cooler environment the results would be even better.
The cooler is a bit noisy I'd say when the system is under full load but at idle state the units is barely audible. Considering its size and the three 120mm fans that come into play the cooler is one of the quietest coolers in its category if not the quietest. The rubber cladding on the pump and the rubber gaskets on the fans do help a lot and minimize the noise levels, without these I'm sure the story would've been quite different.
My Verdict
I've not been a fan of Antec AIO coolers for one reason or the other but that was till I got my hands on the Antec Mercury 360! Antec has almost made everything perfect about this cooler with only a few minor cons which are easily outweighed by the pros that it has to offer.
The radiator and pump are all solid in build and look elegant from every possible corner with no unnecessary RGB nonsense! Tubing is good but the anti kink design is a bit old now can be replaced by a simple straight tube if not something that is sleeved. Cooling performance is really good for a cooler of this category and its true power is seen when the processor is overclocked so yet again its proven that this cooler is only meant for people who plan to run really hot/overclocked systems as at stock you'll be better off with a smaller unit. Mercury 360 is one of the quietest 360mm AIOs out there today and that is all because of the rubber cladding on the pump and the gaskets on the fans which is a very good move on part of Antec. They've compromised raw performance at the cost of silence but you can always swap them with aftermarket fans from any other brand with higher RPM to reap this unit's full benefit.The blue LED is subtle and bright enough to impart a sense of style to the cooler & also changes color with the temperature but I would've loved to have control over its behavior in terms of temperature limits for the LED colors and even turn it completely off if required.
"All in all the Antec Mercury 360 is a step in the right direction and would appeal to enthusiasts and gamers alike with enough elegance to woo in some modders aswell who want something different from the usual and boring AIOs."
Pros-- Solid Build Quality
- Easy Installation
- Great Performance
- Supports push-pull configuration
- Silent
- Aggressively priced
- Tubing could be better
- Not compatible with AMD Threadripper
- No software to control the LED behavior
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