Cooler Master MasterLiquid Pro 280 CPU Cooler Review

Performance

Straight away we can see that the MasterLiquid Pro 280 is a fantastic cooler, giving us some of our best temperatures at just +21c over ambient, and an idle of just +1c over ambient. Surprisingly it’s a little warmer than the MasterLiquid 240, but the fans were running much slower on this model, and it was quieter overall, so you could easily dial them up if you wanted to, but you certainly won’t need to.

Pushing the heat up with a heavily overclocked CPU proved no problem for the 280, and it’s now turned the tables on the MasterLiquid 240mm, delivering +34c while the 240 clocked +36c, showing that the bigger radiator is doing its job very nicely. I would be more than happy running this CPU at high loads for long periods with this cooler installed.

Those new fans are doing a great job here too, at just 36dBa they’re as quiet as you could hope for and barely make a whisper. There was a slight humming from the pump, but you have to get your hear about 1ft away before you can hear it.

Even at full power, the fans aren’t having to work particularly hard to keep things cool, giving us low noise consistently. There was more noise from the pump, but certainly no more than we usually hear from any AIO cooler and it’s unlikely you’ll hear that with the cooler installed in a chassis anyway. Keep in mind we only have the fans set to their quiet mode, silent or performance mode will give you even less noise and even more airflow as you see fit, but honestly we think they’re just fine on the middle setting, as you can see!