Bennett Ring mounts one of the first mass-produced water cooling kits and chills out.
You know a product is teetering on the verge of the mainstream when companies like Thermaltake release a mass-produced version. And now that we’re starting to see all-in-one water cooling kits hitting our CPUs, the art of H2O cooling is finally becoming available to those who don’t have an Engineering degree hanging on the wall alongside their Mensa certificate.
The most remarkable feature of this kit has to be its bargain basement price. At a shade under $250, it’s the first truly affordable water cooling kit on the market. When you consider that some high end heatsinks sell for around $120, not including the cost of a fan, $250 isn’t that much of a stretch for most PC enthusiasts.
The Aquarius II has everything you could possibly need to get your H2O adventure on the road. The radiator is constructed entirely from copper, which helps to balance out the fact that it’s smaller than usual. An 80mm 2,400rpm fan is mounted to this, and provides whisper quiet airflow at a mere 22dBA. The radiator is rated to last for a whopping 50,000 hours, which is approximately five and a half years of continuous use. So by the time this thing finally craps out on you, you’ll probably be replacing it with a liquid nitrogen cooling system developed by Boeing, who entered the CPU cooling market in 2006.
The waterblock is also constructed of Copper, which is very surprising when you factor in the total cost of this kit. At only 260 grams in weight, you’re a lot less likely to smoosh your Athlon core with this waterblock than with some of the half kilogram behemoth air coolers. The surface that makes contact with the CPU is very flat, but a little corrosion on the review sample could have benefited from a quick lapping session, which is to be expected from a highly polished Copper surface. Thanks to the inclusion of three different clip types, this waterblock will fit on AMD K7, Intel P4 and even the new K8 CPUs.
Mounting for both K8 and P4 chips is very sturdy, as a special metal brace is included that makes use of the four mounting holes around these CPUs, while the K7 clip uses a singular brace that straps onto the standard Socket A mounting lugs.
The 12V water pump pushes through approximately 90 litres per hour, at a pressure of 1.2kg per square centimetre, which isn’t very powerful compared to most other pumps.
Unlike many pumps in use on water cooling systems, this unit is incredibly quiet, at 20 dBA. A cute little blue LED is nestled away within the pump, which doubles as the reservoir, helping you to keep an eye on water levels as well as making it a worthy candidate for display through your Perspex window. Unfortunately the pump feels a little dinky, like most of the components in this kit, but it’s not as if you’ll be subjecting it to the rigors of a triathlon once you’ve mounted it. Like the radiator, the pump is rated to last for 50,000 hours.
A small reserve water tank is also included that is supposed to be mounted on the rear of your case, just to ensure that the water levels within the system remain high. However, you don’t need to install this if you don’t feel the need. All piping is also included, along with lengthy springs which fit inside each pipe, removing the problem of pipe kinks that we’ve seen in other kits. Heck, there’s even a small bottle of concentrated coolant solution, to stop the growth of fungus within the water. Nice.
Installation and setup was superbly simple. Thanks to a comprehensive manual that has step-by-step photos of the installation procedure, figuring out which pipes went where was too easy. The inclusion of several high strength magnets is a brilliant idea, as these are used to mount the radiator and pump without the need for any case hacking. And if you happen to have an aluminium case, you can stick a couple of provided metal plates to your case interior, onto which you then mount the magnets. Thermaltake really have thought of every possible configuration that this kit could be mounted in, and have supplied all that you could need regardless of how bizarrely you want to set this up. Of special note were the brilliant hose clips -- instead of having to force incredibly tight pipes over large connections, these easy to use clips make sure that your pipes aren’t going to work their way loose. This was tested by yanking on the pipes as hard as we could -- they didn’t move a millimetre.
We tested on our newly tweaked Chernobyl test rig, which has had a couple of small components adjusted due to some screwy results we recorded with certain high end heatsinks (see Short Circuits for more details). This means that the results of the testing aren’t comparable with any of our earlier Chernobyl tests. So we retested a Thermalright SLK-800 (one of the finest HSFs known to humanity) with a high speed 80mm Delta fan for the purposes of comparison. Chernobyl was set to pump out 80W, with the AMD CPU replica in place. Ambient temperature was a constant 24C throughout the testing.
The Aquarius II peaked out at a very respectable 53C at a near silent operating volume, which is the exact same temperature that the Dustbuster of an SLK-800 reached.
While this kit doesn’t offer significantly better performance than a high performance air-cooled HSF, it does so at incredibly quiet volumes. And at $250, there simply isn’t a cheaper water cooling kit on the market. Well done Thermaltake.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012