jll
Power Member
Review WaterChill cooling kit
By Fuad Abazovic: Monday 10 May 2004, 14:10
WE PLAYED WITH SOME WATER a few weeks back and got some nice results that we simply could not file before. Here's what we learned about Asetek's WaterChill cooling kit.
Asetek is a company known for its VapoChill cooling systems that helped us to get Northwood to 4.4GHz and Prescott to 4.3GHz but the system we reviewed before is only for hard core people with lots of money. With water it's much easier as these kits are the in the sub ?200 league and they have advantage that they run almost completely silently.
You can see here that we were able to cool Radeon 9800XT with this water kit here and that we where able to overclock a card from its default 412MHz to 505MHz at the same time running the CPU at almost 4GHz.
The WaterChill kit comes in a nice retail box and you get a CPU water block, GPU and Chipset block in the most expensive package, although you can get kits with the CPU block only. You get a pump to make the water flow through the plastic pipes provided to ensure you cool your machinery, plastic pipes and a system to isolate this from the computer itself.
When I had a conversation about cooling in general with the owner and CEO of Asetek he said to me that I have to consider water kits if I really wanted soundless machines. Phase change systems such as VapoChill and Prometeia know are quite noisy as you need extreme cooling for extreme performance.
This kit is very easy to assemble and it will take you just a few minutes. Everything has to be measured before you put the system together as you have to cut your own pipes before you place the system in the case. The system we used was for cooling the motherboard chipset, a CPU and a graphics card and even cooling more then just the CPU we were able to get some impressive results.
You have to pour the water and start and shut down machine few times to get the bubbles out of the system first. After two minutes you are ready to rock and roll as it doesn't take long to mount the system. You can actually even replace the CPU as we actually did more then once in few a seconds which makes this WaterChill very easy and practical to use.
On our test-bed we had:
Prescott 3.2 and Northwood 3.4 GHz
Abit's IC7 MAX3 motherboard
Abit 9800XT PRO INQ edition water cooled card
Corsair DDR 550 PC 4400 memory
Kingston HyperX 4000 DDR500 Memory
We were able to squeeze as much as 3.94GHz from a Northwood CPU. We manage to get to 4GHz but the system was not rock solid and crashed a bit. But just a few months ago you needed phase change systems to reach that limit.
We learned that the best way to test is with 3Dmark01. If you can make your PC run that you can run all sets of programs and all will work fine. When we'd learned what we could clock to, we stressed the thing to breaking point.
The final score we reached was 3940 MHz with a 3.4GHz Northwood, 3.85 with both P4 EE and with the Prescott 3.2GHz. This can be explained by the fact that Prescott is a hot CPU and Extreme Expensive Edition actually has so much cache that has to be cooled for the CPU - the brain of a PC - to remain sane.
At these speeds you could get almost 7000 in 3Dmark with 9800XT, 20435 in 3dm01 and 394 FSP in Quake 3 all in 1024x768. Memory in Sandra reported an incredible 6221/6151 MB/s while PC Mark gave a 9621 CPU score and 17002 in the memory test.
If you want to overclock, get decent speeds and cool your CPU, graphics and chipset this might be a very good choice for you. It's almost soundless and quieter from any cooler you have. It removes the need for coolers and the subsequent noisiness from your system and will get you to almost 4GHz. What more could you ask for? If you want to play with water this might be a very good choice for you. µ
More info in: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15821
By Fuad Abazovic: Monday 10 May 2004, 14:10
WE PLAYED WITH SOME WATER a few weeks back and got some nice results that we simply could not file before. Here's what we learned about Asetek's WaterChill cooling kit.
Asetek is a company known for its VapoChill cooling systems that helped us to get Northwood to 4.4GHz and Prescott to 4.3GHz but the system we reviewed before is only for hard core people with lots of money. With water it's much easier as these kits are the in the sub ?200 league and they have advantage that they run almost completely silently.
You can see here that we were able to cool Radeon 9800XT with this water kit here and that we where able to overclock a card from its default 412MHz to 505MHz at the same time running the CPU at almost 4GHz.
The WaterChill kit comes in a nice retail box and you get a CPU water block, GPU and Chipset block in the most expensive package, although you can get kits with the CPU block only. You get a pump to make the water flow through the plastic pipes provided to ensure you cool your machinery, plastic pipes and a system to isolate this from the computer itself.
When I had a conversation about cooling in general with the owner and CEO of Asetek he said to me that I have to consider water kits if I really wanted soundless machines. Phase change systems such as VapoChill and Prometeia know are quite noisy as you need extreme cooling for extreme performance.
This kit is very easy to assemble and it will take you just a few minutes. Everything has to be measured before you put the system together as you have to cut your own pipes before you place the system in the case. The system we used was for cooling the motherboard chipset, a CPU and a graphics card and even cooling more then just the CPU we were able to get some impressive results.
You have to pour the water and start and shut down machine few times to get the bubbles out of the system first. After two minutes you are ready to rock and roll as it doesn't take long to mount the system. You can actually even replace the CPU as we actually did more then once in few a seconds which makes this WaterChill very easy and practical to use.
On our test-bed we had:
Prescott 3.2 and Northwood 3.4 GHz
Abit's IC7 MAX3 motherboard
Abit 9800XT PRO INQ edition water cooled card
Corsair DDR 550 PC 4400 memory
Kingston HyperX 4000 DDR500 Memory
We were able to squeeze as much as 3.94GHz from a Northwood CPU. We manage to get to 4GHz but the system was not rock solid and crashed a bit. But just a few months ago you needed phase change systems to reach that limit.
We learned that the best way to test is with 3Dmark01. If you can make your PC run that you can run all sets of programs and all will work fine. When we'd learned what we could clock to, we stressed the thing to breaking point.
The final score we reached was 3940 MHz with a 3.4GHz Northwood, 3.85 with both P4 EE and with the Prescott 3.2GHz. This can be explained by the fact that Prescott is a hot CPU and Extreme Expensive Edition actually has so much cache that has to be cooled for the CPU - the brain of a PC - to remain sane.
At these speeds you could get almost 7000 in 3Dmark with 9800XT, 20435 in 3dm01 and 394 FSP in Quake 3 all in 1024x768. Memory in Sandra reported an incredible 6221/6151 MB/s while PC Mark gave a 9621 CPU score and 17002 in the memory test.
If you want to overclock, get decent speeds and cool your CPU, graphics and chipset this might be a very good choice for you. It's almost soundless and quieter from any cooler you have. It removes the need for coolers and the subsequent noisiness from your system and will get you to almost 4GHz. What more could you ask for? If you want to play with water this might be a very good choice for you. µ
More info in: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15821
