Water cooling gushes into PC mainstream

WATER COOLING isn't a hardware weirdo's status symbol anymore - its benefits, combined with simpler setups and lower cost, have enabled it to become an often-seen sight in high-end PCs these days.

While they don't go to the extent of good-old Kryotech and its -40° C freezer capability, water coolers still help get an extra 10%-20% of sustained, reliable CPU performance. My good old Corsair Hydrocool 200 had no problem running the 3.73 GHz P4 Extreme Edition at 4.2 GHz and FSB 1200 for days at a time, and I think the only thing preventing it from going higher was the mobo FSB limitation - the Nvidia chipset, I think.

You can also go ahead and cool more than just CPUs these days - some setups, like the Corsair one I tested, include both GPU and chipset cooling, so the only items remaining to 'air cool' are storage drives, memory, south bridge and, of course, the power & voltage circuitry on the mainboard - a very important portion, mind you. The glow-in-the-dark or UV-lit liquid and tubes can be quite a show-off, too, making the people enchanted looking at all that stuff.

Here I tested the two water cooling systems on two configurations each: one was an AMD Athlon X2 4800+ on MSI Nvidia SLI board, and the other (more exhaustive tests) was Intel 955XBK board with both dual-core Pentium XE and Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.73GHz - and yes, these two beasts overclock very differently on the same board. The AMD config had 1GB of OCZ Platinum low-latency 2-2-2-5 DDR400 RAM (it ran that way till DDR450+ without a hitch), and the Intel config used 1GB of Corsair XMS5400UL low-latency DDR2 memory (3-2-2-8 at 675 MHz, in fact this wonder RAM clocks at a gigahertz too with relaxed settings). Both used the sturdy, cool HIS IceQ II Radeon X850XT PE card running at 590 MHz GPU/1180 MHz RAM in sync (not the #&$*% boy band).

Corsair Cool
Coming in a big box, the Corsair entry is a successor to their HydroCool external water cooling boxes - the principle is the same: a strong high-pressure pump (350 litres/hour at 22 PSI) with a reservoir on top and a mixture of distilled - no fluoridated tap water, please - water and coolant liquid (ethylene glycol plus anti-corrosive stuff), and a multi-socket retention adapter set for the all-copper CPU cooling block (anything from Socket 939 and Socket A to Socket 478 or LGA775). The radiator and its fan are of the 120 mm type, so the preference is still to mount them externally (kit provided), unless maybe there is a kit to mount them in the three 5.25-inch front storage bays? That would be literally 'cool'.

In any case, the reservoir itself is engineered to fit into a top 5.25-inch drive bay, and it should be there to ensure optimum liquid flow. Plenty of fat (3/8-inch inner diameter) tubing is provided so that, even if you buy the optional chipset north bridge cooling block, and one or two GPU cooling blocks, you're still more than fine. The pump will do its job fine, too, up to that load - it should be mounted at the bottom of the case, by the way.

This kit is highly customisable in terms of config, so it needs a lot of manual work to set it up. I'd personally like it if they engineers could provide a version that fully fits internally into the casing so that the cooling tubes don't come out.

CoolerMaster AquaGate Mini R120
This is the very opposite of Corsair Cool - the CoolerMaster unit is literally 'mini', coming in a box half the size, and with just two main components: cooling block & pump, plus radiator & fan - connected via two cooling fluid tubes. All is in already, fluid, cables, all of it. You just need to select the right adapter for your CPU socket, mount the rear mainboard support plate, fix the cooling block on the CPU, find the place for radiator & fan (the R80 80mm version is far easier for this since most cases use 80mm fans), connect the cooler & fan power cables, and there you go!

CoolerMaster also has AquaGate, a higher-end cooling system, that fits into two 5.25-inch drive bays, with a nice LCD display and more customisation options. In either system, there are no options for GPU or north bridge cooling at present. So, it is a tradeoff of simple trouble-free installation vs customisability.

Cooling the heat
It was way easier to get the CoolerMaster unit to work in both AMD and Intel cases - it took around seven minutes altogether in each case, including fixing the bottom plate on the mainboard, but leaving the case open and operating the radiator and fan externally. But the results didn't really make up for the difference. OK, in the AMD case, the AquaGate managed to run the CPU at 43° C, and push it up to 2.7GHz (DDR450) memory speed for reliable Windows run, even though we relaxed the HT multiplier to four instead of five. Memory was not the problem, as the higher clock didn't work stable even with memory timings relaxed and voltages upped. Still, we got those 12% extra performance - fine. On the Intel side, it managed to push the dual-core XE to 3.6 GHz (multiplier 18) - we didn't change anything else on board.. but the system monitor was showing 59° C temperature, not that much cooler than the best air cooling solutions. The single-core 3.73 GHz XE went up to 4.2GHz fine (47° C in BIOS), but not beyond.

The Corsair, with its separate reservoirs, pumps and so on, took far longer time to fix, around 40 minutes the first time, and 30 minutes second time after sorting out the 'procedure', but the results were worth it, I guess. We checked the results in the BIOS hardware monitors on both boards.

The AMD worked fine at 2.8GHz (DDR466) at 39° C, and, with relaxed timings, even at 3.0GHz (DDR 500 CL 2.5-3-3-7) with 41 C temperature. Beyond that, it booted in BIOS at 3.2GHz, but didn't go off to Windows. On the Intel side, the dual-core XE was fine at 3.8GHz (multiplier 19 - nice that Intel left these chips unlocked), and we also ran it at the original multiplier 16, but 920 MHz FSB (15% overclock in Intel desktop utility), i.e. 3.68GHz, and it ran fine... in the first case, the temperature was 51° C, in the second - 49° C, not bad. This time, with nasty overclock, the 3.73GHz P4 EE managed a respectable 4.48GHz clock (1.28GHz FSB) before it became impossible to push further, yet stick within 46° C as shown by BIOS - and, yes, it booted to Windows fine. In this case, though, I had to fix a separate handmounted fan to cool the increasingly overheating VRM portion - even though the North Bridge was also water-cooled using the Corsair.

Different coolers for different users
Over all, if you're first-time water-cooler-bearer, the CoolerMaster unit's simplicity will be attractive - it's a setup that is hard to go wrong. But the cooling power you get is just a notch above the best air-cooling systems. For supposedly more cooling power with the same simplicity, the bigger Aquagate unit from the same vendor may be more attractive.

The Corsair is sophisticated, needs reading the manual deeply, and there are many parts to take care of. But, once done, it performs like wonder. The only things it misses are finding a way for easier fully-internal mounting (maybe an 80 mm radiator/fan combo?) and a kind of extra fan on top of the CPU element, to cool the VRM area around the CPU socket which the CPU fan would normally handle - Gigabyte's water cooler has it already, but I guess Corsair can do a better one on this? In other aspects, Corsair is the choice for the high-end water cooling in this case. µ