Maximum PC Water Cooling RSS Feed

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.

Hit the jump for delicious info on this ESA-enabled monster.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Cooler Master Aquagate S1

David Murphy — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 14:14:24 -0500

If we could give points for looks, Cooler Master’s new Aquagate S1 liquid cooling system would rank among the top products we’ve tested. But sadly, we base our judgments on performance. This thing is supposed to be able to cool a quad core, but it’s obviously designed for CPUs less powerful than even the FX-60 in our test machine.

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