Cooler Master Masterliquid PL360 Flux

Cooler Master MasterPlus+

The MasterPlus+ is Cooler Master’s go to software for many of their devices that supports customizable RGB. After installed the app, we we were greeted to update the firmware on our unit. The MasterPlus+ offer the ability to save and import profiles. This makes it easier to transfer the customization between systems or share them. The MasterPlus+ UI is clean and has a lot of customization. However, I found that the UI is not the easiest one to use. For one, the app is not resizable and takes 1920×1080 resolution, which is way too big. Furthermore, despite the app takes such big space, some of the UI elements such as profile (located on the upper right corner) and some buttons are too small.

There are total of 11 preset lightning effects available: spectrum, static, reload, recoil, breathing, refill, demo mode, fill flow, rainbow, and multiplayer. The effects applies to all of the fans except the multiplier where we can apply different presets to each individual fans. In addition to the presets, we also can customize individual fan. The way to configure the RGB effects is a bit confusing. This is partially due to the fact that the software lacks the ability to create customize name for the fan. Instead, it calls the fan as 1-1, 1-2, 1-3, etc so it is a bit hard to keep track them. While the software does provide an option to help identify the fan (which you select a fan (1-1, 1-2, etc) and click on “identify” and the fan blinks purple (default color). Despite this, I would still prefer to be able to label each fan individually.

We have the option to adjust each individual LED color and the fan’s overlay effect. Each LED color can be adjusted while the overlay setting applies to the entire fan. What this means is that there are some repetitive work. For example, if you would like to configure the same color for all of the LEDs on a single fan, you would have to click the color you want and click on each individual LED since there is no “apply all” option. For the overlay, you have the option for 6 overlay settings and there are 6 overlay effects (static, reload, recoil, breathing, refill, turn off). Each overlay settings lasts about 5 seconds and the fan will go through all 6 of them. This means that even if you just want a single setting for a given fan, you would need to configure the same setting for all 6 slots.

Once the settings have been configured, you can rearrange them. However, because they are in sequential order, if you move a setting to a different place, everything will be moved up or down accordingly.  For example, looking at the image left and you can see that the 1-1 fan from the pump has 12 LEDs with rainbow color effect and if I drag it to a different location, say 1-5 (which is configured as blue), settings for 1-2~1-4 fan would move up 1 place while the 1-1 now takes the effect that was in 1-5 (blue) as shown on the image on the right. Both the LED setting and the overlay effect would be changed though the software did not update the overlay setting. I found this is slightly confusing and hard to keep track them once I started to move a couple of them around. This is partially due to the fact that we do not have a way to label the fans. Furthermore, we found that the LED color does not always match when the two fans do have the matched numbers of LEDs. Looking at the picture above and you can see that the 1-5 fan 8 LED was configured as blue but when we drag the 1-1 fan that has 12 LED, only 8 of them shows LED and the software filled the rest of them as purple (the default color). This is most likely a software bug because the fan displayed the correct color. Though, the mismatch color further adds confusion.

Overall, we feel that while the MasterPlus+ offers a good customization options; however, its UI needs work to make it more user friendly.