Posted 07/11/08 at 07:33:48 PM by David Murphy

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.

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cooling, water cooling, Cooler Master, hardware, reviews, build a pc, aquagate max

Posted 05/22/08 at 02:43:57 PM by David Murphy

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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water cooling, Cooler, coolit, hardware, reviews, build a pc

Posted 05/07/08 at 02:08:10 PM by David Murphy

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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water cooling, coolit, hardware, peltier, tec, reviews, build a pc

Posted 03/07/08 at 07:38:00 PM by David Murphy

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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water cooling, coolit, hardware, peltier, tec, reviews, build a pc

Posted 01/28/08 at 05:41:21 PM by David Murphy

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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cooling, water cooling, zalman reserator, reviews, build a pc

Posted 01/17/08 at 01:01:25 PM by David Murphy

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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water cooling, CPU Cooler, hardware, cases, koolance, reviews, build a pc, pc4-1025bk, rigs

Posted 11/14/07 at 07:45:29 PM by David Murphy

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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water cooling, CPU Cooler, swiftech, reviews, build a pc

Posted 09/27/07 at 02:14:24 PM by David Murphy

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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cooling, water cooling, Radiator, Cooler Master, reviews, build a pc