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Overall, the Antec Mercury 240 is an unspectacular liquid cooler.
It does have the advantage of LED fans and a temperature-reactive LED pump, but I find the latter feature to be a gimmick quite frankly. For instance, the pump glows red once the CPU temperature reaches 41C, as if 41C is somehow a dangerous temperature for your processor. Given the vast majority of CPUs will get hotter than that while gaming, the feature seems pointless to me.
Installation is pretty straightforward, though, and shouldn't take too long, but it is not as simple as Asetek's method. I also found the corrugated tubing to be very inflexible, making life difficult if you want a clean-looking installation.
Performance is also disappointing, as we found the Mercury 240 was actually outperformed by the Cryorig H7 – a £35 air cooler – across both our tests. I would expect a bit more from an £80 liquid cooler. Update 20/9/17: We have since tested a new sample of the Mercury 240 and found it to perform a little better than our original sample, though it still could not overhaul the H7.
The last thing to touch on here is acoustics, and honestly the Mercury 240 is fine in this regard. It is far from the loudest cooler I've heard, so I cannot be too critical.
On the whole, though, I have to say those with £80 to spend on a liquid cooler could do a lot better than the Antec Mercury 240. The Arctic Liquid Freezer 240, for instance, is cooler, quieter and cheaper.
You can buy one for £79.99 from Overclockers UK HERE.
Update 27/7/17: Antec got in touch with us and it seems we may have been shipped a pre-production model of the Mercury 240. We will be getting another sample soon and will test it when it arrives. We will continue to update this original review as the story unfolds.
Update 20/9/17: We have tested our new Mercury 240 sample and found it to cool better, but not by much. For full details, see page 5 (‘performance and comparisons'). Overall, we still feel that there are more compelling options than the Antec Mercury 240.
Pros
- Reasonably quiet.
- Installation is simple enough.
- LEDs may appeal to some.
Cons
- LED pump turns red at 41C – rendering it pointless.
- Tubing is very inflexible.
- Out-performed by a £35 air cooler.
- Arctic Liquid Freezer 240 is an all-round better product for less.
KitGuru says: There are a few too many issues with the Mercury 240 for us to give it an award. Primarily, it is outperformed by a £35 air cooler which is hard to take considering this is an £80 liquid cooler.
How the f!ck (sorry for the bad word, but in this case it’s appropriate) can a 240mm AIO perform so badly?
Bad pump?
Bad fans (not a lot of static pressure)?
Air bubbles inside the rad/tubes/waterblock?
Few reasons:
At a guess, it’s the god awful pump. From their site: https://www.antec.com/product.php?id=707259&pid=58&lan=nz
Water pressure from the pump is less than half a d5 pump, and flow rate is utterly shocking at a mere 3.5L/Min. In comparison, a d5 pump does 1500L/H max, or 25L/min, about 7x the flow. Since it’s not an asetek pump like most AIO competitors, its likely the rad is sourced elsewhere too, so its fin density’s an unknown factor too.
I didn’t see the Antec site. The pump situation explains everything
Hi all, just received my Antec M360 Mercury 360mm from Scan and I have to say that it is running very well. P95 for over 30 minutes as we speak with the highest core reaching 64 degrees. At idle it hovers around 21 to 26 degrees..british weather near London. System is a 6700K at 4.4Ghz on all cores…I am impressed and looking forward to Kit Guru’s updated revue on this. One problems though… the light does not change colour from Blue..It should go to Orange and the Red when it is at max load but always stays blue on mine…Not sure why. Temps are better than my Corsair H110i GTX especially at load and it is quieter.
I found similiar results to you also. Not sure on how KG got such results.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/f32c6742b2bc71418dd20a05c4b379a8e7807f0cb487e38c3dfac61cd74ef616.jpg I have now been using the Antec for nearly 3 months and as I look at my temps, which are currently idleing at 21 degrees whilst writing this and having VLC player running a movie in the background and at full load in Prime95, aida, Intel Burn has never topped 65 degrees…Do not understand those results at all, maybe its the 360 version that I am running but boy does it do a good job at keep my CPU running cool in all circumstances..
KG, I would also mention that the Antec does not change colour to Red at 41C as this has never happened on my one. I did get a response from Antec and this is what I was told, which after checking on my one is correct:
From Antec – https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b4549f594c0da3013b78cce1d65b727e0fa4a1be9a238a6a830122d32a1e96f1.jpg Regarding to our Mercury 360, the heat dissipation is very good, if the CPU core temperature is 65 degrees, the CPU surface temperature is about 55 degrees, the cooling water and CPU temperature is about 20-25 degrees lower, so it doesn’t reach the heat temperature of change colour, ( our design has installed the thermistor inside the head of water cooling )
If you want to test the water cooling head colour changes, you can try to unplug the power from the two water fans, afterwards the fan will stops and the heat cooling function ability will go down, and then CPU temperature will rise up, after a few minutes later you should see the cold head colour changes. But remember to plug the fan back in afterwards.