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CoolIT Domino A.L.C.

Nathan Edwards — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 12:00:19 -0500

Entry-level water-cooling at a competitive price

CoolIT is somewhat notorious for enormous but effective closed water-cooling systems: its Boreas and Freezone Elite kick the pants off of conventional air coolers and are much more user-friendly than piecemeal water-cooling setups. Now CoolIT wants to bring self-contained water-cooling to the masses with the Domino Advanced Liquid Cooling.

The Domino eschews both the large heatsinks and the Peltier thermoelectric coolers of its predecessors in favor of a radiator and single 12cm fan, which gives the Domino less oomph than the Boreas or Freezone Elite, but confers several advantages to the water-cooling newb.

First, the Domino costs a cool $80, compared to $600-plus for the Boreas and $350 for the Freezone Elite. Second, the Domino is much smaller and easier to install; CoolIT boasts that an amateur with no CPU-cooling experience can install it in 10 minutes.

The CoolIT Domino A.L.C. can't match the power of its bigger siblings, but its size and price make it a perfect first step into water cooling.

Installation is refreshingly simple, though it does require a backplate for LGA 775/1366. Once the backplate is installed, you simply screw the CPU heat exchanger mount into the backplate and mount the radiator module in your case’s rear 12cm fan mount. The included rubber fan mounts make it an easy and screw-less affair.

The Domino’s fan module includes an LED that displays fan and pump speeds, coolant temperatures, and system alerts, as well as a button that lets you toggle between three fan speeds: Quiet, Performance, and Full. Quiet keeps fan speeds low and noise minimal, while Full roars up to 3,000rpm for maximum cooling power. In Performance mode, the fan speed varies between 1,100rpm and 2,500rpm, depending on the CPU temperature. Unfortunately, to switch speeds, you’ll need to open your case’s side panel, or leave it off.

In Quiet mode, the Domino matched our stock cooler’s idle temps, while at Full it was cooler by 13 C. In both Performance and Full modes, the Domino outperformed our favorite air cooler, the Zalman CNPS 9900, by two and six degrees, respectively. But the Zalman still reigns at idle, and in Full mode the Domino is louder than the Zalman.

The CoolIT Domino is an excellent first water-cooling kit for beginners, and though performance can’t match that of its bigger brothers, the Domino makes up for that in price and ease of installation. And its cooling easily matches the best air coolers we’ve tested.

This review originally appeared in the June 2009 issue of Maximum PC Magazine.

Cooler Master Aquagate Max

David Murphy — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:33:48 -0500

We never said water cooling was simple, and Cooler Master’s Aquagate Max doesn’t make the delicate assembly process any easier. But once you connect your last run of 3/8-inch tubing to this beastly setup, you’ll have accomplished two goals: doubling your geek cred and giving your processor an awesome heap of non-peltier cooling.

The Aquagate Max comes with its own coolant additive that gives the kit a neon-green glow.

Both the kit’s 120-gallon-per-hour pump and 260ml reservoir fit within a monstrous black-and-green enclosure that takes up two 5.25-inch bays. Two holes on the enclosure’s face indicate how much fluid is in your reservoir and allow you to wonder why the Aquagate’s flow indicator is spinning so slowly. The pump is half as strong as the market’s best (the Laing D5), but it’s still powerful, leading us to believe that the indicator is improperly placed if Cooler Master intended for it to do anything more than sluggishly rotate.

This is the first Enthusiast System Architecture-certified water-cooling device we’ve tested. Two sensors you attach to the tubing report information back to an Nvidia software GUI, which lets you adjust the speed of the two 12cm fans attached to the Aquagate’s 30x14x7cm aluminum radiator. The only other information presented in the GUI is the temperature of the coolant and the reservoir’s fluid level; we expected far more options than that, such as the ability to control pump RPMs or automatically vary fan speeds against temperatures.

While the din of the Aquagate’s fans will keep your neighbors up at night, the cooler performs impressively. It cools a bit better than the best air cooler we’ve tested, Thermaltake’s DuOrb (July 2008), in both our CPU idle and burn-in tests. And its large size allows it to bully smaller all-in-one water-cooling kits—like its predecessor, the Aquagate S1—right off the benchmark chart.

The installation process is taxing, but the cooler’s overall prowess is worth the payoff, making the Aquagate Max our water-cooling kit of choice. But if ESA is where the future of cooling is headed, we’re curious to see what other manufacturers, or even a Cooler Master firmware update, might offer.

CoolIT Pure

David Murphy — Thu, 22 May 2008 14:43:57 -0500

Whenever we see an all-in-one water-cooling setup that combines a pump, radiator, fan, and miniature reservoir in a small enclosure, we get nervous. They remind us of those wacky commercials from the black-and-white era of television, when a slick-haired man in a fuzzy gray suit would try to sell you some mystery tonic that could cure your coughs, polish your car, and kill your cat. Just as those elixirs are little more than junk science, we’ve found that budget water “coolers” attempting to put too many operations under one roof tend to perform marginally better, and often worse than, your processor’s cheapo stock cooler.

We’re used to testing ultra-performance cooling products from CoolIT, which helps to explain our mild shock when we first laid eyes on the company’s Pure CPU cooler. It certainly looks like one of CoolIT’s usual peltier coolers, only it isn’t. The Pure is just a plain old water cooler sans CoolIT’s typical technological wizardy. The pump sits a smidgen to the left of its usual location and the cylindrical radiator—lacking any thermoelectric devices attached to the side—is now squared up and screwed into the device’s 12cm fan.

Attaching the self-contained cooling system to your processor requires a standard motherboard removal. We were surprised to find the results well-worth the effort. The Pure isn’t the best cooler we've tested, but it’s strong for its size. And unlike some of the smaller all-in-one water coolers we’ve tested, the Pure actually cools. It cools well, too, outperforming an Intel stock cooler by a hefty 14 degrees in our CPU Burn-in test. And did we mention it’s quiet? We’re talking cat-walking-on-carpet quiet. You can barely hear the whir of the Pure’s fan even if you suction-cup your ear to the side of your chassis.

The cooler’s lack of customization is troubling, given how much CoolIT’s worked to combine automatic power controls with its devices. There’s no way to modify the Pure’s cooling level, a deterrent for power-users who don’t mind trading a little extra noise for increased cooling prowess. The design of the cooler is also a sore spot for enthusiasts. The pump rests on a large plate that runs parallel to—and almost directly against—your case’s side panel. It’s not as much of a concern for those with solid doors on their cases, but it kills the aesthetics of a transparent or grated panel.

We've seen this plate on CoolIT’s other coolers, but that’s because there’s no other way to pack the accompanying reservoir and thermoelectric cooling modules into a self-contained device. Since the Pure is little more than a bare-bones water-cooling unit, surely CoolIT could have combined the water block and the pump, devised a new design for the pump entirely, or just minimized the panel.

The CoolIT Pure is an easy to install water cooler that is more powerful than a typical stock air cooler. However, it lacks the super-powerful heat reduction and configurability of CoolIT's other products. The Pure might not make an enthusiast happy, but it’s a great fit for silent-performance rigs and water-cooling newbies alike.

CoolIT Freezone Elite

David Murphy — Wed, 07 May 2008 14:08:10 -0500

Hands down, CoolIT’s chilled-water Peltier coolers provide the best way to cool your CPU. However, as the technology for these coolers has advanced, so has their complexity and size.

Like CoolIT’s Eliminator Peltier device (reviewed April 2007), the Freezone Elite sports six thermoelectric coolers (TECs), which transfer heat from the coolant to the device’s 12.1cm-long heatsink. But the Elite rocks a 12cm fan rather than the Eliminator’s 9.2cm air pusher, and instead of a three-setting toggle switch to control fan speed and TEC power, the Elite comes with CoolIT’s MTEC Control Center, which lets you control the device via the operating system.

Controlling the cooler is as easy as installing the included software and setting a temperature for the coolant: The program adjusts the cooler’s fan speed and TEC power to attain the desired temperature. This keeps the fan from having to be set at full bore (and saves our hearing in the process—at full speed, this fan brings the noise). But that’s just the beginner mode.

Enthusiasts can set minimum and maximum power points to ensure certain levels of performance independent of what is established as the coolant temperature. It’s especially helpful if you’re obsessed with either cold temperatures or quiet operation.

Installing the cooler requires motherboard removal—and a bit of luck, since the Elite rests perilously close to critical components. We were worried that the device’s entanglement of tubing and power cords wouldn’t fit above our CPU. And our fears persisted when we had trouble connecting the fan and power cords to the cooler’s MTEC box. We had to bend the prongs of the MTEC’s fan connectors to achieve a lock-solid connection.

The payoff, however, is exceptional cooling. When we ran the Elite at its bare power minimums, it chilled our CPU like a quiet stock cooler. But cranking the Elite’s settings to full blast destroys the competition—save for CoolIT’s very own 12-TEC Boreas cooler. The Elite’s cooling prowess comes with a steep price and a bit of a tricky installation, but it’s easily the most practical of the super-chilling CPU coolers.

CoolIT Boreas

David Murphy — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 19:38:00 -0600

There comes a time in every young PC builder’s life when he seriously considers outlandish ideas for modifying and cooling his smokin’ new gaming rig. But you don’t need to mod your PC into a refrigerator to reach subzero temperatures, not if you have CoolIT’s latest 12 TEC cooler, the Boreas.

CoolIT’s Boreas could likely fit a stock CPU cooler inside its sprawling gut, a 4-inch-long heatsink with a 12cm fan on each end. Two mounting brackets are preattached to the device, and thank heavens! Few cases have enough room for this chubbo. The included MTEC control box connects the Boreas’s automation software to the device, although it uses an entire USB header with absolutely no pass-through.

That’s not too bad a sacrifice given the payoff. On its quietest setting, the Boreas beats out the loud Zalman CNPS9700 air cooler in both our idle and burn tests. Cranking the Boreas to the max drops our CPU temperature to 11 C, but created dangerous levels of condensation. It’s the Boreas’s Achilles’ heel: Cool too much and you could destroy your rig. The included software and controller mechanism minimize this issue by letting you pick a temperature for the Boreas to shoot for—a feature sorely missing in previous CoolIT coolers—but finding the perfect setting requires a little experimentation.

Zalman Reserator XT

David Murphy — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 17:41:21 -0600

Zalman is no stranger to gigantic external liquid-cooling devices. We’ve become so accustomed to seeing its huge, tower-like Reserator coolers that we nearly choked when the 15-pound Reserator XT arrived in our Lab. For starters, it’s not a large, awkward-to-carry cylindrical column. The rectangular apparatus is comparably compact and sleek, more akin to a subwoofer than a home-theater speaker.

While the rectangular device works wonders as a doorstop—even better once you dump 1.25 liters of fluid into its aluminum bay—it serves far better as an external cooler for your CPU, provided you don’t mind a little bit of a setup, that is.

We expect a bit of a construction process when we cross the line from snap-and-clip air cooling to where-are-the-napkins liquid kits. The Reserator XT tested our patience by riding the delicate balance between annoying and infuriating. Instead of priming the machine by pouring liquid into the reservoir, you must jostle the whole device back and forth (while turning it on and off, while a beeping alarm is blaring) just to get fluid into the special “degassing” tube. Attaching the water block to the Reserator XT forces you to pry the special no-spill nozzles off of the ends the degassing tube (not fun) and reattach them to the virginal 3/8-inch tubing. Apparently, the concept of giving you two extra nozzles didn’t cross Zalman’s mind.

As for the cooling, the chart says it all. This thing poured a pitcher of rock-out all over our air coolers, beat all the lame, preconstructed water-cooling units we’ve encountered, and even rivaled our favorite peltier coolers in terms of degrees cooled. Our only hesitation comes from the lack of a difference in performance when the fan is running silently versus cranked. That’s awesome for those who like quiet low temperatures, but it would have been nice to see increased performance when the device is at full power.

Koolance PC4-1025BK

David Murphy — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 13:01:25 -0600

Sweet mercy, at first glance Koolance’s PC4-1025BK case seems like a perfect power-user box. Unfortunately, this water-cooling-enriched case is simply too small to contain certain enthusiast hardware and too complicated for the average user.

The case integrates a water-cooling mechanism directly into the chassis—Koolance’s KIT-1000KB cooler, a tri-fan setup that comes with a front-mounted controller mechanism for auto-adjusting the fans’ speeds. The whole getup is a tidy little package that cools monstrous amounts even when using the quietest mode the PC4-1025BK offers.

But impressive benchmark scores do little to alleviate our utter contempt for the design and building process that accompanies the PC4-1025KB, an experience wholly unlike what one encounters with the similarly outfitted Gigabyte Mercury Pro (January 2007).

Building a functioning machine in the case is nightmarishly complicated. You have to assemble the CPU water block yourself, attach the tubing, and somehow wedge a motherboard and high-end components upside-down amidst these plastic modified tentacles. A 7.1-inch-long power supply doesn’t even fit in this Lian-Li case—unless you remove a drive bay. An Nvidia 8800 GTX barely fits in the case as well.

It doesn’t help that Koolance neglects to include a manual for the case itself. You get a manual detailing everything you need to know about the accompanying water-cooling mechanism, but no guidance on how to set up anything else in the case. True power users may never refer to a manual, but it’d be nice to have a reference during the installation process.

Midtower cases might work for some high-end rigs, but the PC4-1025BK proves that an antiquated design plus tons of tubing spells disaster.

Swiftech H2O-120

David Murphy — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 19:45:29 -0600

A lot of the enclosed “for newbs” water-cooling kits we see at Maximum PC are pretty lame. You get a pump/heatsink combination that’s mildly irritating to install, connected by tubing that’s slightly wider than the veins in your arm. The tubing goes to a radiator that’s often unable to handle the heat output of the processor—even with a noisy 12cm fan pushing more air through it than a jet engine. You spend half an hour installing the device for a whopping cooling difference of three degrees versus what you get from a stock air cooler.

Assembling and installing Swiftech’s new H20-120 water-cooling setup will leave many on the brink of frustration, but if you’re willing to trade an hour of your life for additional cooling relief, this device delivers. It cooled our test rig by an average of 6.5 degrees more than our stock cooler in both our idle and punishment CPU tests, outperforming most of the water-cooling kits we’ve tested.

Setting up the H20-120 is similar to building a DIY water-cooling kit. The pieces don’t come assembled; you must do the grunt work. If you’re running an AMD rig, you need to take apart the Intel-specific waterblock that’s attached to the pumping mechanism by default. Instructions are provided, but the process could be confusing for a liquid-cooling newbie.

In a perfect world, Swiftech would have taken a note from its competitors and preassembled the entire kit. The company could close-loop the system and free everyone from having to double, double toil and trouble up a liter of coolant—of which the cooling kit uses very little. Small details, but absolutely crucial for inexperienced users that want a no-fuss setup.

The H20-120 functions great, but it straddles the line between the newbie and enthusiast markets. It’s mildly complex for the former, and its lack of included water cooling for graphics cards will surely make the latter froth at the mouth. Consider this a practice run for your first piecemeal setup.