Displaying items by tag: Water Cooling

PowerColor has introduced a graphics card LCS R9 290X, which comes with 4GB of GDDR5 memory and water cooling. PowerColor graphics card is currently only (R9 Radeon 290X) on the market that instead of cooling fan has water cooling. It is composed of a closed block within which there is coolant, completely covering all the built-in components and keeping them at temperatures below 60 degrees Celsius even under maximum load.

According to Corsair existing water cooling systems are not sufficiently adapted to the average user, but require a certain amount of skill and knowledge when being installed.

Although all-in-one water cooling systems are nothing new, their rise in popularity is something very recent. We have watched as multiple companies have launched products designed bring “enthusiast” level cooling to the masses. This type of move is also nothing new as we have watched it happen with RAID, SLI, and many other items that were once only for gamers and other computer enthusiasts Still what many do not know is that most of these companies all buy their parts from the same place; Asetek. This company makes great water cooling products and they resell the pieces to others. Now, while that represents most of the market there are some that still build their own; one of these is Cooler Master. Back at CES 2011 we were allowed to see a prototype water cooling unit and we knew that they were looking to do something very different. Now in last months of 2012 Cooler Master has released their work. Today we will be taking a look at the Seidon 120M all-in-one water cooling unit to see if all of Cooler Master’s hard work has paid off.

There is sad news in the computer enthusiast world today as Danger Den, one of the original water cooling companies has made the formal announcement that it will cease trading; they are closing shop. For many, Danger Den was the “got-to” company for high quality off-the-shelf water blocks. Their solid designs and attention to detail marked all of their products. I first started working with Danger Den when I was writing for the website Planetx64 (now closed also). We covered their CPU water blocks and even were fortunate enough to test some of their first multi-GPU cooling products. They were always great to work with and were parts that we highly recommended.

Water cooling for high-performance cooling has been around for a very long time. It started (as many things do) with super computers and the need to maintain a specific temperature envelope. From there advanced cooling broke into the consumer market (over the course of a few years), in the form of heatsinks with larger fans and even TEC (Thermoelectric coolers) cooling. However, for the most part water was still avoided due to the potential for leakage and damage to components. However all of that changed very quickly once the 1GHz barrier was broken. Companies seemed to come out of the woodwork with pieces and parts for water cooling. Radiators, water blocks, tubing fans, pumps, you name it you could but it. Now that we are well into the 3-4GHz range for stock CPUs the water cooling industry is very strong with components in multiple places in the market. The concept of the self-contained cooling system has also caught on with products produced by multiple companies. Today we will be taking a look at one from Thermaltake called the Water 2.0 Performer. This $63 cooling system is supposed to be able to keep things cool for both AMD and Intel CPUs including the LGA 2011 Core i7. Let’s see how it does.