Unboxing the S24
As always at Guru3D, we start by unboxing the product and showing you an installation of it onto a motherboard. The initial unboxing is fairly typical of your average dual fan AIO, though I have to give continued appreciation to Fractal for their manual packaging (as nitpicky as that sounds). A manual 'thrown in' would do the job, but having one sleeved in a snaplock bag is nice to see, despite making no practical difference at all.
You can already see the standard G1/4 fittings that will allow this loop to be expanded, should you so wish. Today, however, it will just be cooling a CPU, though cooling a moderately overclocked CPU and mid-higher level GPU in the same loop should be entirely doable with tamed expectations. This feature does, naturally, also allow the loop to be drained, should the owner so wish. A liquid can evaporate from even a closed loop over time, so doing this is not out of the realms of possibility.
Thermal paste - as is fairly common - is not supplied with the cooler, and is instead pre-patched onto the base of the CPU block and pump combo. When the system is powered on, this will rapidly melt and function as normal paste, despite looking dry when first unboxed. All accessories are supplied in a separate bag, and the mounting bracket for Intel LGA 115X is already locked onto the block. Today, naturally, we will be removing that for use with AMD's AM4 socket. All sockets including AM4, LGA 2011-V3, 2066, and legacy AMD sockets like AM3/3+ and FM2/2+ are also supported. This should give you plenty of mounting options, and it's nice to see nothing has been left out here.
Continuing on, we see the pump head and attached braided PWM (thank you, Fractal Design) cable for controlling the Asetek pump. As the unit is set the 'Auto' mode by default, that is what we will be sticking with today. The modes are actually changed 'on unit,' with the user physically rotating the pump head to the 'PWM' mode. As before mentioned, black is the only colour present, with the pump head lacks any kind of RGB illumination whatsoever. In the RGB and LED obsessed year of 2018, I have to say this is a nice alternative for those who want it.
The fans are - as before mentioned - packaged separately, and are Fractal's mid-tier GP-12 PWM units, with white blades. Some may decry the move away from an all-black unit. I, however, welcome this. All black would look a little drab, in my opinion, and having the colour contrast makes the unit look... even a little striking? Whilst lacking any kind of lighting based bling, I have to say I do appreciate the visual work done here. The fact the fans are PWM is another nice touch, as these GP-120's also make for some very quiet case fans, should you wish to use something different with your S24.
