Lian Li Galahad II Trinity 360 Review

Introduction

Lian Li and their Galahad series of AIOs was always known to be among the very best. Now they just released an updated Version II with thicker tubes, a re-designed pump, and hopefully better performance! Let's take a closer look at the newest Galahad Trinity II in 360mm and find out how it performs!

What's in the box?

Unlike most AIOs we reviewed in the past, the Galahad II Trinity comes already pre-assembled. This might not seem like a huge deal, however as all of the Fan-wires are pre-daisy-chained and hidden within the fan frames, this is a very welcome surprise.
Other than the assembly process, a Galahad II comes in a relatively standardized AIO package containing the following items:

• Lian Li Galahad II Trinity 360
• Installation Hardware AMD & Intel
• Thermal Paste with Spreader and 2x Application stickers
• Connection cables for L-Connect 3

Down below you will also find a short summary of the AIOs specs.

Compatibility

By default, the Lian Li Galahad II Trinity comes with the Intel mounting brackets pre-installed. In combination with the appropriate backplate, these can be used on either an LGA 17/1200 or LGA 115x socket.

In order to use it ontop of an AMD chip, only the retention bracket on the pump side needs to be replaced. For the installation, the original AMD retention brackets should be used.

Individual Components

Tubes

Lian Li's Galahad II Trinity in 360 is full of surprises, one of these would be the thickened tubes. However, instead of just slapping more isolation material and thicker sleeves ontop of each other, Lian Li decided to thicken the inner diameter of the tubes from 5.8 to 7mm. This creates a much larger water flow allowing more hot water to be moved away from the cold plate.

Additionally, the tubes are about 400mm long and sleeved in a high-quality sleeving material.
But there's more!
On the radiator side, the tubes are attached using an out-sticking and movable 45° fitting. Although it doesn't make the tubes longer, the already pre-defined angle makes it incredibly easy to route the tubes through the PC as well as providing you with more usable tubing length as no bends need to be taken into account.

Radiator

The Radiator in use consists of a 360mm wide 19FPI radiator in the usual 27mm thickness. Compared to the Performance sub-version, the radiator on the regular model doesn't seem out of the ordinary.

Fans

As the fans are pre-installed on top of the radiator, there is very little to do except for connecting them.

However, although it might not look like it, the back side of the fans is hollow. This makes them unbelievably unappealing to look at if you ever have to turn them around. Therefore, we would highly advise leaving them in the orientation as they come in, either as intake with additional radiator screws in the front of a case or as an exhaust in the top.

The fans are spinning at up to 2450RPM whilst pushing up to 89.1CFM at 3.26mm/H2O and are controllable over PWM or directly via Lian Li's L-Connect 3 software.

Base & Pump

Another aspect of the AIO which got a huge upgrade is the Base and Pump. On the inside, we will find the same pump Lian Li used in previous iterations of this cooler, however, one step above, both the impeller as well as the redesigned water distribution plate have been fully redesigned.

If we go even further, the copper plate responsible to transfer the heat has also seen some major updates with its greatly reduced fin thickness.

Appearance

As this is still a Lian Li device, it needs to shine. And so does the Galahad II Trinity 360. Both the fans and pump cover are fully controllable using Lian Lis L-Connect 3 software resulting in some stunningly looking optical effects.

The implementation of RGB looks quite good with the pump cover looking slightly better.

Instead of forcing a universal design, Lian Li includes 3 additional cover parts. The User can choose to remove the original "Lian Li Infinity Mirror" and replace it with either the Dazzle Mode or Sink Hole, two designs that look quite different from the original.

Benchmark

We benchmarked the cooler using our new CPU Cooler Benchmark Machine featuring 3 different Workloads at 320, 250, and 120W.

120W

On the "light" workload at 120W, the Galahad II Trinity managed to keep the 13900K at 28.3°C above ambient. This positioned it dangerously close to the performance version of this lineup and at the very top of the list.

On the Noise-to-Performance graph, we can see that from start to finish, the Galahad II Trinity managed to keep a solid third spot compared to every other AIO we tested so far.

250W

While pushing about 250 watts through the 13900k, we were able to accurately measure what the AIO is capable of. At this workload the Galahad II Trinity managed to keep the CPU at 55.1°C above ambient, moving up one spot on the list.

Interesting here to note is that the Trinity managed to outperform the Alphacool Core Ociean T38 360 at this point. Seems that the thicker radiator of the Ocean wasn't that useful once the power is pushed high enough.

On the Noise-to-Performance graph, we can see that the overall ratio changed a lot compared to the lower workload. From start to finish, the Galahad II started to switch positions with the Performance version and from time to time even managed to be on the first spot.

320W

On our maximum power mode, the Galahad II reached its limits. Although still on the third spot, the gap between the regular and performance version became much bigger. However, noteworthy here is that it still managed to be on the list at all.

On the Noise to performance part, we can see that the fight with the performance version is definitely over with the Trinity being in third place from start to finish.

Conclusion

It was a total surprise to us. Having already reviewed the performance sub-version beforehand, we were convinced that the Galahad II Trinity would end up as the "budget" option of this lineup.

However, to our very surprise, it outperforms a huge chunk of AIOs we have tested in the past. It may not be quite on the same level as the Performance version, but it was ridiculously close.

Adding to that, Lian Li did not artificially block any of the new Lineups features in order to make the performance version more appealing. The regular Galahad II still got the higher quality long and thicker tubes, it still got the protruding 45° movable fittings on the radiator side, and it still got the redesigned pump plates as well as inlets and outlets. It got it all. The only difference is the choice of fans and single-wave radiator fins.

However, these two differences did not stop the regular Galahad II to perform like a top champ, most of the time even beating other alternative beasts such as the Liquid Freezer II 420.

Design-wise, the Galahad II is definitely a piece of eye candy too. Thanks to the interchangeable pump covers, the user can re-design the design of his build and customize the colors of every part to a point where we don't see an actual limit.

All of these reasons lead us to the obvious conclusion. We can absolutely recommend the new Lian Li Galahad II Trinity for pretty much every build, even the latest power-hungry Intel i9, and AMD R9 chips!