Thermaltake Floe Riing RGB 240 TT Premium review: Perfect for overclockers

We couldn’t let the year pass without looking at one more RGB all-in-one (AIO) watercooler. If you don’t count Nvidia’s RTX cards (and we’re not, until developers actually start adding ray-tracing to their games), this particular subset of CPU coolers has been the closest thing 2018 has had to breakout PC tech. Taipei’s Computex show was filled with them, and we’ve long had a favourite in the Cooler Master MasterLiquid ML240R RGB. What, then, makes the Thermaltake Floe Riing RGB 240 TT Premium Edition stand out, other than an abundance of syllables?

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Thermaltake Floe Riing RGB 240 TT Premium review: Installation

One thing is its straightforward installation. It needs to be assembled, naturally, but this process is both devoid of common watercooler construction annoyances and has benefitted from some smart design touches. The best example is the series of built-in rubber pads on each corner of the two 120mm fans, which prevents the plastic frame from vibrating against the metal radiator when the blades are spinning. Some coolers achieve the same thing with a rubber gasket, but getting these in place before affixing the fans can be a pain. 

Pre-installed thermal paste is another welcome time-saver, and the braided tubes connecting the cooling block and the radiator are very flexible, so positioning the latter for attaching to the front or top of the PC case is a lot easier than if they were stiff. We also appreciate how the backplate’s standoff receptacles (the Floe Riing is mounted to four of these standoffs poking through the motherboard) are already in place. With a lot of other socket-agnostic AIO coolers, including the MasterLiquid ML240R RGB, these receptacles must be slid on to the backplate manually, and getting them in the right place for your socket can be fiddly. There is none of that here, obviously. 

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We installed the Floe Riing on an Intel LGA1150 socket, home of our test PC’s Core i7-4770K. The process for AMD sockets, including the latest AM4, is very similar, using standoffs and thumbscrews to fasten the cooling block instead of having to clip it on the standard mounting bracket. That’s fine by us: trying to install any kind of cooler on to AMD’s clippy brackets is one of the most awkward, frustrating things in DIY computing. 

There’s just one problem with setting up this cooler, and it’s the enormous jungle of cables that the RGB functionality demands. The two fans don’t connect directly to a motherboard; instead they, as well as the cooling block, plug into the bundled controller box. This in turn connects to the motherboard via USB header, while a 4-pin Molex connector delivers power from the PSU. The resulting wire mass is a cable-tidier’s nightmare, especially as the two fan cables are so long – 90cm each, by our measurements.

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Thermaltake Floe Riing RGB 240 TT Premium review: Performance

Still, once we’d stuffed them all inside our case, the Floe Riing performed brilliantly. With the Core i7-4770K running at stock speeds (3.5GHz with a 3.9GHz Turbo Boost), idle core temperatures varied from 28-35°C, and only rose to 48-51°C for the majority of our 4K benchmarks, during which they peaked briefly at 54°C. That’s at least a couple of degrees cooler, on all counts except idling, than the MasterLiquid ML240R RGB. 

While running Metro: Last Light Redux with a GTX 1060 graphics card, it also kept the CPU heat low, with core temperatures generally within the 39-42°C range and peaking at 47°C. That’s about even with Cooler Master’s AIO, rather than ahead of it, although such results beat the excellent NZXT Kraken X62 (Shopper 348). 

After overclocking the Core i7-4770K to run at a permanent 3.9GHz, the Floe Riing impressed even more. Idle CPU temperatures remained unchanged, and running benchmarks saw a very mild increase to 53-57°C, with a peak of 59°C. The Metro gaming benchmark also produced identical temperatures to stock speeds, at least for the most part; we recorded a slightly higher peak of 49°C, although that’s still lower than the Kraken X62’s 51°C.

Thermaltake Floe Riing RGB 240 TT Premium review: Verdict

With performance so good, just a couple of small blemishes are left, besides the excess cabling. The first is that although the fans are decently quiet – there’s hardly any audible speed difference between idling and load – we did notice a high-pitched, electrical-sounding buzz, which turned out to originate from the cooling pump. It blurs in with the fan noise (including case fans) enough to avoid becoming truly annoying, but it’s unfortunate that this cooler could have been even quieter.

The second is the cost. £143 is still a price worth paying for such effective cooling, but the MasterLiquid ML240R RGB is only £100, so it’s still the RGB AIO cooler we’d choose. If you’d prefer a less flashy but still very chilly watercooler, the Kraken X62 has dropped to £130. That leaves the Floe Riing RGB 240 TT Premium Edition short of must-have status, but it’s still a great choice for overclockers.

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