 For a limited time only, buy an Intel Core i5 or Core i7 CPU and get a free 3 month subscription to iRacing.com. Available from participating retailers, click the link in the video description for more details. Welcome to a long overdue unboxing of Cooler Master Sidon 120 XL and Sidon 240M Liquid Coolers. Now the first thing I noticed about these is check this out. Cooler Master has gone ahead and put compatibility for LGA 1150 right on the box. Now it should be noted that LGA 1150, which is for Haswell or Intel Core i7, i5 and i3 4th generation processors, is not really going to be any different from 1155 or 1156 in terms of heatsink compatibility. But, I mean it's just one of those things where it always amuses me when there are coolers being announced and being shipped that have compatibility for an upcoming socket when you actually can't buy said socket yet. So, the main difference between these two coolers is going to be in terms of the size, which is a little bit funny to me because the 120 is the XL and the 240 is the M, which in terms of North American sizing usually indicates extra large and medium, whereas the 240mm one is definitely extra larger than the medium sized 120mm one. So let's go ahead and check out what Cooler Master has done in terms of packaging here. So these are liquid coolers, these are pre-done liquid coolers, so actually they're pretty fine, we'll start with the outside. So they are maintenance free, they're designed for overclocking, they use an ultra-fine micro-channel design for the CPU block itself. Now what you're going to see right here guys is that this is not an Asetek and it is not a Coolit design. So Cooler Master has wanted to differentiate themselves from what the other guys in the market are doing and they have done that by, well, not doing what everyone else in the market is doing, which is sort of one way to differentiate yourself from what everyone else is doing. On the back you find ultra-fine micro-channel, so pretty much the same, a hot, durable and powerful water pump, dissipates heat effectively and maintains temperatures throughout the stable water circulation, all that kind of good stuff. Okay, so let's go ahead and start with the 120 in terms of what's inside. We've got some foam on the top, we've got mounting hardware, which we will be unfamiliar with because it is not the standard Asetek or Coolit mounting hardware. So let's go ahead and see what we got here. Oh, I love this, nice solid pieces of everything, see? See, solid steel mounting plates. So there's your AMD mounting hardware at any rate. Alright, there is your Intel mounting hardware, so you can see that screw is able to adjust in position. See, moves over, clicks into place just like that. We've got a back plate for Intel, so this pops into different positions as well. So it has full compatibility for 775, 1155, 1156, 1150, 2011, 1366, all the sockets you could possibly want. And AMD, because they haven't changed their mounting hardware in like a bajillion generations, it's pretty much the same as before. Same thing here, nice solid mounting screws. These ones look like they're for LGA, oh, oh, they could be for a number of different things, but okay, there you go. Again, more solid pieces here, so it looks like the way it mounts is the back plate comes through the board, goes into one of these guys, and then the cooler itself mounts to that piece from the other side from the top. I like this system, there's a number of different coolers that have used it in the past, and I find it's very solid, very sturdy, and works very, very well. They've also included a splitter for the two fans, so there's a PWM splitter, which is awesome, because it means that you can provide PWM control for both of the fans without actually having to run one of them off of DC. And, I mean, honestly, a lot of motherboards might have all the PWM fan connectors in the world on them, but it doesn't always work correctly, so there you go. It's nice to be able to split the CPU on, or a lot of the time, they aren't controllable to the same degree of finitude, as the one for the CPU connector is. So this is a nice touch, Cooler Master includes a couple of 120mm fans, and they also include a couple of nice rubber isolating mounts for them, so you don't have to worry about any vibrations being transferred to your case and causing your computer to be louder than necessary. These are intended to be installed in a push-pull configuration, because if you set them both to push or both to pull, you're going to have yourself one heck of a problem. This radiator is optimized for, I guess I'd go sort of mid-range in terms of, do you have to have high RPM, can you get away with low RPM, because the fin spacing isn't particularly dense, which is great for low RPM quiet operation, but it is a thicker radiator than you find on most 120mm coolers, meaning you'll get a little bit more performance out of it, but you also have to have a little bit more static pressure to the fans, in order to draw the air that you need through it. You can see how Cooler Master fills their water cooler, so there's a little warranty void if removed plug right there that shouldn't get in the way of anything, because once you go ahead and install a fan on it, it's not really any higher profile than a fan would be, and they're using a quarter inch corrugated plastic tubing approach that has been in use for, well, years now on these pre-filled liquid coolers, and there haven't really been any notable problems with them. There's also a rotating fitting right here, so you're going to have the flexibility to mount it either sort of this way, facing down, or if you rotate those like that, this way, facing up, just like that. It uses aluminum fins for the radiator itself, but there are copper tubes as well as copper tanks, and a copper bottom for the block itself. You can see they're using a security bit here. I actually have one of these, so I could take it apart if I felt like it, but they're using a security bit to prevent users from taking apart the unit, which is not what it is intended for. It is meant to be maintenance-free and not opened up or anything sort of bad like that. Alright, so let's have a look at the 240 millimeter version. We've got two of the same fans. It looks like the noise-isolating rubber mounts are not included, at least on the fans themselves. Yes, here they are. So those are included instead in a very heavy... I love heavy mounting hardware. It makes me just feel that much more reassured about it. So there are a couple of them in with the rest of the mounting hardware, where there's thermal compound, just like the 120 millimeter version, a fan splitter, just like the 120 millimeter version, and then just more of the same mounting hardware. So this is for... instead of having it in two separate bags, it looks like they've done just one bag for the 240 mil version. The radiator itself is a thinner style radiator, so you're gonna see this one is, I'd say, mid-thickness for the 120 mil, and then this is more like standard thickness, and then there are some that are actually larger and thicker than this one, but those are much more rare than these ones, and that's for compatibility reasons. Not all cases are compatible with the thicker style radiators. This one, in order to make sure that it gets the performance it needs, uses a much more dense fin arrangement, right here, so you can see that it's all about surface area, guys. So if you have a thicker radiator and you use a less dense fin arrangement versus if you have a thinner radiator and you use a more dense fin arrangement, what you've done is you've actually, in both cases, increased the resistance to air passing through, but also increased your surface area and improved performance. So generally speaking, the less dense, the more optimized it is for low RPM fans, and the thinner it is, the more optimized it is for low RPM fans, whereas if you were to put even double the density in here and put, like, you know, jet turbine fans on it, you could squeeze more performance out of this form factor because surface area is king, and that's why the dual 120 mil version will perform better than the single 120 mil version. So you've got that same fill point here at the top that says, do not tamper with or remove, please don't do that, same corrugated plastic quarter inch fittings or hoses, as well as the same rotating fittings down here at the bottom attached to the same block and pump combo. This is why I did these unboxings together. We've got a copper plate at the bottom that looks flat anyway. It's hard to... Oh, no, it's bowed. There you go. I wonder if the other one is as well. You can tell if you look at them in the light just right. Yep, they're both bowed. So what that does is it increases contact pressure and reduces temperatures as long as you design a mounting mechanism that's correctly sort of optimized for it. So if you have a CPU here and then you have a bowed, so this is flat and this is bowed, and you have a bowed surface and then you clamp it down, what can happen is you can end up with two flat mating surfaces, whereas if you take two flat mating surfaces and you clamp this down a lot at the edges, you can end up with a cavity in the middle. We discovered this, it must have been back in around 2008, 2009. D-Tech figured it out with their bowed block that they were putting O-rings in in order to bow out the base of it and get a tighter mounting point. So there's a little water cooling history lesson for you. Cooler Master's using a very high quality sleeving on the connector, so the pump is powered by a three-pin that you really can't see any of the color of the wires inside. I like this. It's a nice touch, makes your build look nice. And they include, of course, detailed instructions. Cooler Master's been doing liquid coolers for, and just coolers in general, for a long time, so I wouldn't expect anything except nice, detailed, multilingual instructions for every possible socket and everything labeled and all those sort of good things done. It looks like the same instructions for the 120 or the 240 millimeter. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos, and thank you for checking out my video on the Sidon 120M and the... See? I did it there. The Sidon 120XL and the Sidon 240M.