When PC hardware companies all jump onto a bandwagon, it eventually becomes almost impossible to stand out from the crowd, because everyone's doing the same thing. Thermaltake must have realised this because its latest AIO liquid CPU cooler has taken cooler screens to a new level, but it's also given it a whole bunch of neat extra features.
The cooler in question is the Thermaltake Minecube 360 Ultra ARGB Sync (via Hermita Akiba on X), and the name alone gives you all the clues you need to guess what the AIO cooler looks like, assuming you've not taken a gander at the images yet.
Where most vendors have been content to add a single LCD screen to their AIO blocks, Thermaltake has added four individual displays to the Minecube: one facing straight up, and the other three forming a 'wrap-around' effect, starting on the rear IO side of the motherboard before finishing at the DRAM slots side.
Admittedly, having a screen facing the rear IO panel doesn't make much sense, because you're barely going to see it in an average PC case. Anyway, using Thermaltake's software, you can apply individual animated GIFs to each panel or have them display hardware info, such as temperatures and clock speeds.
That's all very cool and whatnot, but four LCD screens and an integrated VRM fan do make that main block a tad on the chunky side. There are no listed dimensions for it, but the pictures suggest it's large. Still, it should be good for 360 W of heat, according to Thermaltake, so it should handily cool even the most power-hungry of CPUs.
The rest of the Minecube 360 Ultra might seem like standard fare (single large radiator, with three 120 mm fans), but there's actually an awful lot to like about it. For example, the radiator pipes are 460 mm in length, which should make it much easier to get the radiator rotated into the right position when installed vertically (i.e. pipe inlet/outlets at the bottom).
Even better are the fans. They magnetically attach to each other, so you only need one cable to connect them to your motherboard, and you can just pull the fan blades out and swap them with the reverse set that are included in the box. Yes, that's right: a fully reversed setup, without having to purchase a whole new set of fans.
Thermaltake says you can wash the blades in water to easily get rid of built-up dirt and grime, and it even provides bearing lubricant to use once they're dried off.
I can't say I'm a huge fan of the quad-screen affair of the Minecube 360, as I prefer my main rig to be all stealthy and black and cool. But all the other features? Heck, sign me up right now, and if Thermaltake adds them to a 'standard' AIO cooler in its range, I might well be first in line to buy one.
