In the history of overclocking, water-cooling was sort of the pioneered "new" method of cooling your CPU. It was a very extreme way to cool down the system, and very risky to utilize. Today, water cooling units are becoming a mainstream method of system cooling. Products are being made that are easy to use, easy to install, quiet, and perform at a much higher standard than that of any standard air cooler. Today, I'm going to show you just how effective this "mainstream" unit can be.

The box is made of a harder cardboard than usual, and on the inside, it was packed very nicely with a soft, yet sturdy styrofoam. Everything was organized nicely, with no tangled cables or wires.

The gear in the box includes some thermal paste, a needleless syringe, P4 mounting hardware, instructions, and the actual unit itself. Also included is a thermal pad and some mounting screws.

The water filling area is on the top of the bay device. This means that in order to add water to the unit, you have to slide it out of the bay about 3 inches or so.

Honestly, a lot of people use water cooling to achieve a much more quiet cooling system. Another problem with this unit is that since it only cools the CPU, you still have to have case fans, graphics card cooler, and whatever else you might use. That means that there is no real noise reduction. The fans can be turned down a bit, but when they are both on high, they hit a whopping 31 decibles, and when they are both on low, they still hit about 25 - 28 decibles. There isn't much of a difference. It's not a loud unit, but it does not really eliminate any noise since you would still require other cooling in the case.

The unit comes prepared to be mounted on an AMD XP motherboard and has the capability to be mounted on a Pentium 4 motherboard. The problem with this, is that in order to mount the unit to your P4, you have to remove the motherboard from the case. This is so that you can install the "X" plate to the rear of the motherboard, which in turn holds the P4 Heatsink frame (which you must also replace with theirs). The P4 mounting hardware is very high quality black steel and is very sturdy.

On a positive note, this unit comes readily outfitted with 3 temperature probes. One comes premounted inside the water reservoir, another in the CPU HSF, and the third isn't installed anywhere. You can install the third wherever you would like to have a temperature probe. On the front is a 3 way toggle switch to display the temps on Red LCD.

Also, this unit comes pre-lapped. That means that you don't have to sit down for an hour with a ton of sandpaper and put all that elbow grease into lapping the heatsink just to get an extra degree temperature drop.

Test Rig:
Abit IT7-Max2 v.2
Pentium 4 Northwood 2.4
Kingston PC3200 512mb
Maxtor 40GB 7200 RPM 8mb Cache
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Platinum
Radeon 9700 Pro All In Wonder

For this review, I'm going to be running my CPU at 2.71 GHz because that's about the highest I can get it stable on air cooling.

Well, the stock cooler outperformed the water cooling unit. Honestly, I think this is due to the small tubing diameter. There just isn't much water flowing through this thing.

Also, I have to add the fact that when I took those benchmarks, I let the computer idle in Windows 2000 for about 25 - 30 minutes. When I ran the test with the water cooler, I had both the system fan and the CPU fan on high. The temperature was quite high and I didn't want to turn them down due to possible system crash.

ED. Note:

John is a veteran when it comes to water cooling, and currently uses a water cooled dual P3 1.4Ghz system, with watercooled video card as well. We both had high hopes for this product, and were impressed with it until we actually got down to business and saw that it was a very poor performer. Since John and I both have a pretty good understanding of common cooling solutions for PCs - from air, to water and pelts - we tried every idea we could come up with to get this unit to perform better. Perhaps we were missing a detail, or something was amis. But to no avail... This watercooler is simply a very poor cooling solution, unfortunately. Good concept - poor implementation.

-Dwayne

As far as cooling is concerned, I'd go with something different if you would like to overclock. If you aren't overclocking very far, or would like something new, this device might be alright. For those of you who don't overclock, this just might be your ticket to get your foot in the front door of watercooling.

In light of the above statements and my thoughts of this product, I would like to award this watercooling device 2 of 5 X's.