Having experienced jigsaw puzzles like Corsair’s Cool, the Aquagate Mini R120 looked to be a marvel of simplicity. The kit is essentially four pieces—combination CPU waterblock and pump, radiator (already connected to the filled reservoir), 120mm fan, and box of screws and such.

This was the first kit I tested, and I thought planting a Cooler Master watercooling kit in my Cooler Master CM Stacker 830 full tower would be a layup. Not quite. Everything was smooth sailing initially. I wasn’t thrilled with having to install a retention module on the motherboard’s back side, but that’s not unusual with liquid cooling. It just meant some weightlifting with the tower and an extra 10 minutes of screwdriver work. The waterblock went on OK, but I made a fortuitous choice with my Asus board. I’ve seen other users get nailed by capacitors or board components too close to the CPU, so beware.

The tubing was so short that it was difficult to rest the radiator somewhere safe during installation, but some motherboard foam padding goes a long way. The real problem was installing the radiator and 120mm fan, which was impossible to do properly given my configuration. The radiator needs to mount to the chassis’ back via four screw holes, which don’t exist on the Stacker 830. The 830 is largely tool-less, and the factory fan just snaps in. Eventually, I gave up and started over with an Antec P180. Total build time was 34:16 (minutes:seconds).

This kit’s positives are the straightforward, relatively quick installation; compact size; zero hassling with crimps or stringing tubes; and never having to touch a bottle of liquid. The fan is very quiet, and it’s almost impossible to hear fluid moving. However, because this is a sealed unit, what are you to do in 12 months when liquid has evaporated from the system? Also, because you can’t hear fluid moving, you’re never really sure if the cooling system is doing its job unless you watch a temp readout.

The Aquagate Mini did gain me about 6 degrees Celsius over stock aircooling—not quite as good as I’d hoped but still respectable, plus it helped drop the overall system noise a bit. For watercooling neophytes this is a strong kit if only for the sub-$90 street price and bragging rights of running liquid. Serious overclockers willing to invest more time and money may want to keep looking. It should be possible to design this kit with no need to remove the motherboard, at least with LGA775, for which there’s no required back plate.

Essential Tips: Measure if Cooler Master’s CPU block will fit on your motherboard and in your case. The base plate is 70 x 85mm. Those extra millimeters can make a difference, so rotating the waterblock 90 degrees may save your sanity. Also, check if there’s clearance for the 120mm radiator, which is overlarge within the case. I didn’t connect the ATX12V line before installing this part, which was frustrating because the connector was lost in the corner until I removed the radiator.


Corsair Cool
$199
Corsair
www.corsair.com
CPU Rating: 4

Coming off the simplicity of the Aquagate Mini, the Cool gave me chills. The package is brimming with many extras that go unused, but there are no extra tiny washers and screws you do need and that mysteriously go missing as you are muscling your tower around on the table. Corsair saves you some time with such touches as preclamping hoses to the CPU block. The “quick” reference documentation is worthless, but a PDF manual on CD is good. Print this for reference before starting.

The Cool is a light modification of a design by Swiftech, a watercooling founding father, and Swiftech’s expertise is apparent. The kit includes two CPU waterblocks, one flat and one with a “step” cutaway. You get the usual 3/8-inch tubing; bottle of green chemicals to mix with distilled water; 120mm fan; various screws, crimps, washers, springs, and retention modules; and a PCI slot shim with cutouts for two tubes. A low-profile pump is supposed to go on a case’s bottom, but I had to tuck it in an unused hard drive bay on my P180, which worked well enough.

Another clever addition is a low-profile reservoir built to mount in a 5.25-inch drive bay. There are two screw holes on each side of the reservoir for case mounting. Sliding rails are a huge plus if available because when adding fluid, you’ll need to keep refilling the reservoir until the tubes are full. The reservoir didn’t drain well into the tubing until I tilted it upright. Because I had to do this many times, rails made life much easier.

The star here is an external fan cage, called the Radiator Mounting Kit, or RadBox. This frame apparatus screws onto the case’s outside using the 120mm fan holes. The fan screws into the frame, and the radiator screws onto the fan. The design adds about 5 inches to PC’s backside. I like this idea as a compromise between bulky external radiators and internal radiator-fan combos that crowd other components. Corsair also includes some firm plastic coil it calls Coolsleeves, which you wrap around the tubing from the radiator to the backplane shim to prevent kinking. Finding this tedious to put on, I rushed it and had unevenly spaced coils that looked unseemly as a result.

My first testing yielded an idle temp of 50 degrees C. When the load test raced to 94 degrees C, I lunged for the power switch—I’d skipped an instruction and discovered the step in the copper block was rotated the wrong way. The step goes over the Socket T locking arm. (I didn’t include the time to fix this in my setup time.) If I had to redo the setup, I would probably finish in under an hour. As it was I clocked in at 1:52:17. Why so long? It’s the little parts, pump priming, reservoir draining, and many revisits to the manual

With the waterblock correctly oriented, I was extremely impressed by the Cool’s performance; it shaved another 7 degrees off the Aquagate Mini’s overclocked load score. Even idling at default baseline clock rates, the Cool swooped in 5 degrees cooler than Intel’s stock cooling.

As for noise, the radiator fan’s constant hum is about as loud as a standard CPU heatsink fan. It’s not obnoxious, but you will be able to hear it in a quiet room. In addition, the water system quietly gurgles like a little waterfall, even after “burping” and topping off the reservoir several times. Because the Cool has no activity reporting or monitoring, the noise was reassuring and soothing. This is a stellar performer and a must for hardened overclockers seeking a compact kit, but it’s probably for those with moderate DIY skills.

Essential Tips: Use little cups to store the kit’s many minuscule parts or risk losing some. These weren’t essential, but somewhere in my testing, I also lost one of the four acorn nuts, which meant a trip to the hardware store. The RadBox’s screw holes weren’t always machined to perfection, and some required some force to get a screw inserted. That said, I stripped one hole, so don’t overdo it.


Corsair Nautilus 500
$159.99
Corsair
www.corsair.com
CPU Rating: 3.5

Now this is what we’re talking about—8:14! The Nautilus is so new that there was no retail packaging available for my sample, and the only documentation was a text-only Word file. It took a Corsair engineer about two minutes to explain the installation, and everything worked perfectly the first time.

At last, someone built a watercooling kit that doesn’t require removing the motherboard. Just take four black plastic posts with squeeze clips at each end (like the white kind we used to use for motherboard standoffs), plant one in each CPU heatsink hole, put a shaped foam pad on top of the waterblock, put an X-shaped retention plate on the foam, and jam the hole at the end of each X arm onto a post clip.

The external radiator and pump is a largish, squat thing that looks nothing like a nautilus. There are no lights, readouts, alarms, probes, or anything else. You just jam the two tubes from the waterblock into the barbed ports on the Nautilus’ back, slap a plastic crimp on each connecter, and fill it up with the included green goo and distilled water. I can’t think of a way to make a watercooling upgrade any quicker or easier.

Noise freaks be warned: During testing, I found the Nautilus fairly loud and only later discovered there's a two-position speed switch in the back. You also hear the faint gurgle of liquid rushing through the radiator. Question the value here if you're running at default speeds. Aircooling does just as well and is quieter. For overclocking, though, the Nautilus shows its worth, although it’s no Cool or Apex.

Essential Tips: If you can’t push the retention posts all the way through the motherboard holes, just loosen the screw at the motherboard’s nearest corner and pull up gently. This gave me just enough clearance and beat removing the whole board.


Koolance Aquian ICM-510
$229.99
Koolance
www.koolance.com
CPU Rating: 2

With an install time of just 30:44 (courtesy of a special converter kit for the P180), the ICM-510 may seem daunting but is actually quite straightforward to set up. There are only two major components: the radiator/reservoir/120mm fan and CPU waterblock. This is an internal job, and the main unit makes a hefty 7.1- x 6.7- x 5.4-inch (HxWxD) footprint. Fortunately, Koolance mounts the fan to the pump unit on a hinged metal frame, so to get to your mobo once you screw the fan to the chassis, you swing the pump out of the case. Slick!

The package also includes a blue LED temperature display that mounts in a 3.5-inch bay, complete with warning alarm and temperature probe that tapes down alongside the mirror-finish copper plate on the waterblock. This complements the inner blue glow within the pump unit.

There are only two tubes, and they install by running each tube end through a screw clamp, jamming the tube onto the waterblock's or pump's barb, and tightening the screw clamp over the barb. Koolance supplies a big pouch of cooling fluid (more than enough to fill the system), but a sealable bottle would have been handier.

Once I figured out that the instructions were slightly wrong and the CPU retention clip needed to rest at a tighter setting within the rail frame, I fired it up and watched repeatedly as the temperatures climbed into the 50s at idle, triggering the unit's alarm. No kinks. Good flow. Tight seal on the CPU. I was stumped, and so was Koolance, which admitted that this was one of its lower-end kits. Still, I shouldn't have seen such high numbers. I rebuilt the waterblock twice, but to no avail. I suspect I received a rare lemon. This kit shows every sign of being a great chiller; no doubt the next box would've been.


Swiftech H20-Apex "Extreme"
$259.95
Swiftech
www.swiftnets.com
CPU Rating: 4

Calling this kit "extreme" is an understatement. It's a deluge of parts, including a massive radiator spanning two 120mm fans. I predicted that if I had to install the Cool kit again, I could do it in an hour. The Apex helped bolster my opinion. Many parts here match the Cool, which Swiftech also manufacturers, and the learning curve I faced with Corsair's RadBox paid off with the RadBox here. There are also many similarities with the complex waterblock assembly.

Corsair's manual is poor. Swiftech's is appalling. Little was useful beyond the exploded diagrams, leaving me to guess which hoses ran where. Fortunately, my guesses worked. In addition, to install this kit you're supposed to drill hose holes in the case's back. Unwilling to sacrifice my P180 unless necessary, I instead removed the I/O shield and snaked the hoses through the gap. This put a slight crimp in the tubing, but I kept a close eye on it, and an hour into use there was no observable detriment. Still, to preserve the pump's longevity, I recommend drilling.

My kit came with a conventional rectangular reservoir I had to stick on the inside of a 5.25-inch drive cage with adhesive Velcro. Had I been running a full stack of drives, I would've had to stick to the removable side panel. With all the tubing, applying the Coolsleeves took forever, contributing to my build time of 1:24:35.

The payoff is the performance. Swiftech's size and technical superiority blows all competitors out of the water (as it were), the industrial quality parts are respectably hushed, and Swiftech also includes plenty of extra tubing. Experienced users won't want to settle for less than this.

Essential Tips: Download Corsair's Cool manual for reference. Also, pack a towel around the reservoir when filling it; it is one of the smallest for the largest amount of tube length I've seen. Because the filling process drags on a while and you're looking for air gaps in the hosing, it's easy to lose concentration and spill.


Thermaltake Silent Water
$119
Thermaltake
www.thermaltake.com
CPU Rating: 4

With only a 22:48 build time, Thermaltake’s unit lands second behind the Nautilus for having the most convenient and simple setup process. I did lose several minutes installing a motherboard backplane—an H-shaped module made of three layers you stick together—and while removing the P180’s top exhaust fan to make room for the internally mounted Silent Water.

Like the Aquagate Mini, this is a two-piece, closedloop cooler. Just bolt the smooth copper block to the CPU, mount the radiator/fan on an available 120mm grille (Thermaltake provides many screw-hole options on the radiator frame), and plug in the power leads. That’s it. The unit’s only possible downfall is its very noticeable fan noise. Sometimes you can get away with not installing the fan-speed controller. Believe me, you’ll want it here.

Otherwise, the news here is all good. Thermaltake’s trademark orange fans match well with the copper pump and CPU blocks. The tubing comes precrimped, and you would really have to try to kink the hoses. Coolant is already installed, and the 12V pump did a fine job even when I put the pump and radiator at the same level. (The pump is always supposed to rest at lowest point of the system.) Cooling performance was average for this group, which in itself is impressive given the Silent Water’s diminutive size. With a very accessible price point, Thermaltake’s solution makes for an excellent first liquid-cooling system.

Essential Tips: While not essential, you’ll save time and do a better and/or easier installation having a hex nut screwdriver that can fit the little tubular screws that secure the waterblock. Fingers weren’t meant for this job. Also, my first try with this kit yielded a fair amount of wiggle in the water block, and I paid for it with high temps.

by William Van Winkle



How Cool Is That?

We went looking for watercooling kits that were supposed to make installation easier, but would they also equate to cooler temps? Here’s what we found out. (Temps in degrees Celsius)