apparently the winning formula is at five millimeters and you end up with an
overpowered fan what if you add 11 millimeters to the red
and five millimeters to the fans well that's how you end up with this beast here
welcome to machines and more today we're going to be checking out this guy here it's the new
phanteks glacier one 240 t30 it's a lot of numbers but it's still very interesting aio recently we
saw how potent these new t30 fans are and if you have the spacer absolutely a great choice
for a cooling application fantax sent by this beefed up new aio featuring these fans for this
review and big thanks to them this video isn't sponsored so all the review opinions and findings
are independent start let's take a look at some of the features of the unit the stand up feature
here is the thick red and it is quite thick for an aio at 38 millimeters so for some of you with
clearance limited sff builds that's going to be a problem along with these sticker fans
but for a lot of you guys you're like i don't get what the big deal is right but either way
do be advised it is on the thick side fantax also makes a glacier 1 mp which features the
same pump and that rat is only 27 millimeters so this one is a good bit thicker than that
typically for aios you'll see anywhere between 25 and 30ish millimeters and this one is right
up there with the one on the arctic liquid freezer 2. as you might know acetec makes liquid coolers
as an oem for plenty of brands like corsair and nzxt and this one is an acetech unit it's a gen
7 pump just like the nzxt x53 over here the main difference here is this is specked with a thicker
red it's rather than the branding the tubing the design of the stuff over the pump critically the
fans the guts of this unit are going to be very similar to other gen 7 as tech units on the market
probably the most important feature with the glacier t30 is these fans that it's equipped with
out of the box and these are the 30 millimeter thick t30 fans that i reviewed recently these
guys are one of the best 120 millimeter fans on the market right now and i won't talk about these
in length because i'll just link to the review here but these bad boys are absolutely going to
be the distinguishing performance feature for this whole combo here and because it's an asatech unit
the fans are going to be that one area that phanteks can distinguish itself
with this thick rad you do want a fan that has good static pressure performance and these are
an excellent choice so that puts this whole ensemble at 69 almost 70 millimeters if you
include the rubber dampeners on the fans so it is quite a bit so make sure you have that clearance
one thing i'll note on mounting the fans to the rand is that the unit thoughtfully comes with two
different screw lengths for attaching the fans the longer ones account for attaching through a case
but they come jumbled all together in the same bag and you have to identify them first so make
sure you get the correct ones that's totally fine to use the shorter ones when you're intending to
use the longer ones because you might just not get any thread engagement but if you use the
longer ones when you want to use the shorter ones then you could damage your heat fins on the rad
otherwise installation is pretty simple you just choose an amd or intel plate that locks into the
grooves on the pump and because of how this system is designed you have quite a lot of freedom with
how the pump head is oriented it doesn't have to be mounted square to the board and there's
pretty fine gradations and that's something i really appreciate about aesthetic units
fantex has this magnetic cover that sits over the pump to provide some noise dampening and drgb
lighting and it just slides over the pump block and clicks into place one thing this cable does
need a lengthier adapter cable to connect up to a three pin motherboard header and i think a lot of
folks will be doing that since you might not have a phantasm rgb controller and this cable does end
up getting pretty long so be advised the rgb is subtle it's addressable and i don't think it's
overly flashy but you can just turn it off if you don't want it the head does dampen a little bit of
the noise from the pump as well so i would keep that in place this pump has a cable running from
it that's intended to be connected to an included splitter cable that is also connected to your fans
which are daisy chainable i'll talk about the pump speed and noise more specifically when we get to
the acoustics discussion and we'll see if that's actually a good idea to have everything follow the
same signal one feature on this pump head i like is the use of 90 degree elbows and that just makes
your tubing run a lot more flexible if you've seen the arctic liquid freezer one of the concerns with
this unit is that the tubes run straight out of the head so it's quite hard to wrangle and
at least for installing in a case the elbows make the extra thickness of the rad something that's a
little bit easier to work around because now you don't have to worry about the tubing around it
is all that volume put to good use well let's take a look at the thermal performance of this
unit i was curious how this would stack up against another performance driven unit like
the arctic liquid freezer 2 and 240 version and i'm also going to be testing against another gen 7
astec unit the nzxtx and all this testing is done in a cooler master nr200 set up as a site
mounted intake and this is a real world testing configuration in case set up with top and bottom
case fans these are the knock to nfa 12 by 25s locked at a thousand rpm for each of the tested
noise levels fan speeds were locked and while the liquid freezer two's pump is meant to be
connected up with the fans to it one single header after 45 pwm the fan runs at full speed anyway
at 2000 rpm so for both tested speeds that pump is 100 for the x53 and the glacier the gen 7 ace
tech pump is locked to 70 and both of these follow the same curve so at this level it's at 2100 rpm
so for the first tested noise level i'm targeting a level half a decibel above the noise floor
t30 is run at 1260 rpm here the nzxt air p120s run at a thousand rpm and the p12s on the liquid
freezer hit 1180. here's an interesting thing though i did actually get that arctic p12 growl
with this round of testing and that did register on the decibel meter so that's the rpm level that
i had to stop at with the 3700x running at an oc of 4.3 gigahertz and 1.25 volts drawing about 95
watts at this level the glacier does have quite a commanding lead and it's about two degrees to
the good compared to the lf2 and a whopping 4 degrees ahead of the x53 here well it's not a
huge surprise though these t30 fans are that good right if we bump up fan speeds a bit not that this
chip necessarily needs those higher fan speeds but we just want to see the performance is there
at a level of two and a half decibels above noise floor things are much more audible here
the glacier t30 spins at 1575 rpm the x53s fans are at 1250 rpm and the p12s on the lf2
are at full speed and no growl here still the same ordinal position here the gap between the
lf2 and the glacier 240 is fairly consistent still around 2 degrees with the cpu and the air p120s
are they're pretty ordinary fans so they really are holding back the performance of the x-53
but clearly the glacier 240 is a very good unit performance wise and this is the reason i often
prefer good 120 millimeter fans over 140s because good ones can easily smoke uh 140. for the nr200
testing i did for the max review i also tested the same setup with that cooler master 280 and let's
just throw that data point onto here at this noise level the 140s on this unit spent at 12 50 rpm so
yeah the fantax unit can absolutely outperform a 280 aio in fact by quite a lot so what's doing
the heavy lifting is it's a thick rad or is it the fan so easy to test let's throw the same fans on
the x53 at the same tested rpms all right look at that with the same fans the performance in a case
at both levels is pretty much indistinguishable that that doesn't mean the thicker rat isn't doing
anything but it does indicate to me that the fans are basically the driving force here and
they usually are for most liquid cooling setups there's one thing to keep in mind for real world
setup and in many cases the thicker you go overall the more choked off your airflow is going to get
case in point with the nr200 that right side fan on the rad panel is inching ever closer to the
power supply shroud as you go thicker so while in theory a thicker rat isn't necessarily a bad
thing if the extra thickness results in more limited airflow or a choke point then it
might just cancel out the efficacy there but the good news is if you have a decent aio already
a fan upgrade can totally breathe new life into your unit all in all this unit out of the box is
going to be the best 240 ao that you can get right now in terms of thermal performance all right so
usually i do around a fan noise samples but since i've already documented the noise levels on the
phanteks t30s i'm just going to direct you to that review these do emit a slightly higher frequency
sound quality when compared to something like the knock to nfa 12s when they get to the higher rpms
but at the end of the day they're still very very well behaved however i did want to take
a little deep dive into the pump noise and you would think that with the implementation
of nasdaq gen 7 pump it would perform basically the same as the x53 in terms of pump noise right
and that wasn't the case here i noticed a pretty honorable clicking noise coming from the review
units when the speed was above 50 or 1700 rpm plural because i let fantax know that the test
unit sounded kind of off so they asked me to test another one and unfortunately i had pretty similar
finding there now typically a hum or a whirring noise is expected with aio pumps and that's
just a nature of these things however i think a clicking sound is abnormal and it can be pretty
irritating to some just to be clear this isn't air bubble noise this unit is filled pretty well
i'd say like 98 and i ended up running it for an extended period of time to see if breaking it in
would get any better and it didn't so here's just a cross comparison between the x53 at the same
overall measured decibel level compared to the glacier 240. both pumps are locked to 70 percent
or 2100 rpms just for the sake of comparison now it's important to keep in mind that this
is more likely to only manifest itself at the higher end of the fan curves and if you've got
everything hooked up to the same header this will be where the fans are at 1575 rpm take a listen
that clicky noise is definitely audible even above the fan noise and i'm highlighting it
because it would bother me in my experience the x53 gen 7 pump does get a little audible
above 65 or so but it's nowhere near as noticeable as what you've just heard
perhaps the x53 is a little bit better dampened with its big rgb display and the little cover
on the glacier 240 doesn't help as much i don't actually think that's the case though because i've
heard a defective x52 and that was definitely very audible even though it shares a similar shroud
design as the x53 now the topic of fan speeds and pump speed it's meant to run off the same header
which means that however you set your fan curve your pump will also index off that same signal
so if you set it up that way you probably won't start hearing the pump until your
curve passes 50 percent but once you head into that higher performance territory yeah
so regardless of whether this pump is behaving to spec or not my preference with this type of
setup is to hook them up to separate headers so at least i can have more granular control of the pump
on its own if the pump bothers you and this varies from person to person you could always set it to
flatline past 50 percent and set up that way you only give up a little bit of performance anyway so
for example at the lower noise level tested the pump set at fifty percent versus seventy percent
resulted in a 1.3 degree delta and that might be totally worth it to you from a sonic perspective
with all that being said fantex is looking into and they're thinking it might be a bad batch of
pumps from ace tech i hope so because otherwise this is a really stellar unit and the expectation
here is just that it performs similar to gen 7 acetec units and if i get to retest it i'll be
sure to have a follow-up so acoustic performance assigned this is the best 240 ao on the market
for thermal performance and to wrap this one up let's just have a look at the value proposition
if you already have a decent ao and it's still working well or under warranty and you want
a performance uplift then i see no compelling reason to throw the baby out with the bath water
just upgrade your fans to the t-30s and as you've seen performance is quite close with just a fan
upgrade this unit is going to come in at the high end of pricing for 240 eio and the roughly
170 us market prices because it includes two of these t30 fans now granted prices for these
fans are all over the place right now at launch they were closer to 30 and now they're somewhere
around 40 but i'm not going to try to predict how hardware prices land in the future but suffice to
say you're getting a gen 7 acetate core for say a hundred bucks a five year warranty which matches
that from corsair and it's a year less than nzxt plus two of these t30s and let's just call it 70
cent right and that's where the value breaks down as of right now the x 53 is going for 120
so if you were to upgrade the fans right away you'd be well over the cost of the glacier 240
so if this level of fan is where you want to end up with anyway then there's a good reason just to
spring for the unit right away assuming you can fit it you simply can't get a unit out of the box
that performs better than the glacier t30 right now and this performance is best in
class if the noise issue is just an isolated issue from a bad batch then i would recommend
this unit without any reservations but if you're buying one right now i'd say just
take the time check the noise level out just to make sure everything is okay i hope you found
the review and the information helpful please give a like if so please subscribe also if you
haven't already and product links for the tested items are down below thanks for watching today