Thermaltake Floe Triple Riing RGB 360 TT Premium Edition PWM TR4 AM4 LGA2066 Ready AIO Liquid Cooling System 360mm High Efficiency Radiator CPU Cooler CL-W158-PL12SW-A

UPDATE: The software continues to crash during boot, after an update to fix issues that were not even on the list of things broken… What are you doing Thermaltake? Sometimes it works and sometimes not – GAH! Sometimes my fans make up their own mind what to doNext month I think I am going to replace this with a different cooler. Actually the only reason for going liquid was NOT cooling but decibels and excitement factor. At this point I think I am going back to hard pipe cooling. This liquid CLS-AIO is for the birds. As far as I can tell Liquid cooling is for bragging rights – not technically needed for thermal management. I am disappointed. I know I got ripped off by the misrepresentation of the product.

HISTORY: My system build starts with an AMD 1920X on a Gigabyte Designare X399 Mo-Bo. With the latest bios update. The system is stable with G. Skill RGB 3200 ram. I have implanted an NVMe Pci-e Samsung EVO 960 drive and power from a Corsair RM850i – the non RGB version of their power supply. All of this is a vanilla system with NO overclocking and a stable OS, viewed on a Sceptre UHD monitor.

THE COOLER: One of the recommended cooler manufacturers for this processor, on AMD’s website, was Thermaltake closed loop AIO coolers. I chose this cooler on recommendation from Thermaltake and the lighting ability of it. I was not convinced of its efficacy for the first 48 hours after the install. I almost took it out because of temperature control issues. 71C to be exact, and BSODs every 20 minutes.
Suspecting the Tt software controller was to blame, I reinstalled the awful stuff.

THE SOFTWARE: this interface is just idiotic. Great idea – childish implementation. It is alpha software at best. I played around with it and noticed that – though workable – the control software was greatly flawed as follows, and not enjoyable to use.

THE INTERFACE: is not resizable; there is no drag and expand, so on a UHD monitor, the whole interface is quite small unless one sets the windows text settings to a larger size. That causes the text to become cut off because the interface itself does not expand to fit the text.

THE INITIAL SETUP: forces the selection of the 4th fan controller first. The interface will not work correctly if you don’t select interface 4 first. Then it allows selection of the first monitor…

FAN CONTROL: NO FAN SPEED CONTROL on the interface for Floe Riing RGB drop down selection. It is only available in the Riing-Plus selection from the drop-down menus of the monitors which shouldn’t work since this is the Floe dual riing RGB – not the Riing-Plus..
Guess what? That can only be selected on monitors down lists NOT related to where the actual pump is plugged into the CPU position – monitor 1, The software balks with an error in red text stating no connected device if you change the pump/cpu monitor to anything but what it actually is. The rest of the monitors apparently do not care if some other hardware is selected instead. Crazy stuff yeah?

TEXT SIZE: None of the text on a UHD monitor is legible unless face planting the screen, or in my case using magnifying glasses, remember, The GUI is not resizable – but whatever is done to Windows resizing is mostly mirrored INSIDE the GUI frame so stuff gets cut off and overlaps. Truly I should not have to resize windows interface and resolution, etc. to make the interface usable, but if they require it of the user, then the GUI should expand to fit the required changes.

TWEAKING RESULTS: After all of the playing around and reinstalling, and playing around more, I finally managed to control the temperature better. Now I span temps in C from about 35C to 65C depending on the load.

BEFORE TWEAKING: the temperature spanned from 45C to 71C. Under a sustained load it grew roots at 71C.

THE LIGHTS: are nice on the radiator and the noise level is lower than the tower air cooler I used on my old AMD FX-8350 Black processor.

THE PUMP: Yet another big issue is the pump speed. As beautiful as it is with the RGD-LED factor, the pump speed/rpm is NOT controllable through the software or anywhere else. There is no real time data on how the pump is performing – not even rpm. I suppose they need that pump speed to stay static to fully disperse water against the fins of the water block? At a minimum, builders need to know if the rpm on the pump is correct.

INITIAL ROUND-UP :>
Does it keep the system running? Yes of course.
Is it where I think it should be for that much money? Hell no.
The software needs a total rework by someone who cares about control interfaces.
The LED’s need better flow control within the factory set patterns.
The controls need to be fully legible on a UHD screen.
There is a continuous disconnect between manufacturers for the AORUS LED controls.
Even GIGABYTE apps have disconnects between their own control software. Some apps don’t work on the new X399 chip-sets, even though they have advertised their app control center as compatible.
ASUSs AORUS controls are not compatible with any builders except those that are in partnership with them.

THE END RESULTS: I don’t feel like I won the battle. I like the hardware – truly. But there is no warm and fuzzy feeling for those who adopt early. There is still much wrong with the software control from Thermaltake that I have not even touched on, such as memory loss, glitchy selection processes, and support. Thermaltake and others are already getting ready to release (or are they already released?) new AIO cooling systems so watch for those and wait to adopt if you can..

I cannot wholly support this cooler because of the initial cooling control disconnect between hardware and the software interface. I have higher expectations for that much time and money invested.