The LL Cool J of water coolers: cool,
but loud
Water cooling is the way to go if you’re
serious about keeping your CPU thermals in check, and the easiest way to dip
your toe in the water-cooling pool is an all-in-one unit that bolts onto your
case. You don’t have to mess with pumps, tubing, or fans, and the kits will
work with any modern CPU and most chassis, so their appeal is maximum cooling
with minimum effort. Thermaltake is on board with this concept, and offers
three tasty all-in-one entrées in its Water2.O series: a low-end Performance
model, a double-rad Extreme model, and the midrange Pro version we examined
this month.
The
LL Cool J of water coolers: cool, but loud
The cooler is an Asetek design that’s
prefilled with coolant and features a fat 48mm radiator sandwiched between dual
12cm fans. Thick rubber tubes shuttle the coolant back and forth between the
radiator and the cooling block, which features a copper contact plate to
maximize heat transfer.
Putting it all together wasn’t too
difficult, but the installation process included one semi-major annoyance,
which well get to later. For our thermal test, we didn’t need to install a
backplate on our LGA2O11 test machine of course, owners of AMD or other Intel
sockets wilt need to do so. With our retention plate already in place, we only
had to secure four screws to the coolers retention ring. The problem is, the
LGA2O11 uses special screws that look nearly identical to the other screws in
the kit (LGA1155, etc.), which was confusing they should be more clearly
labeled, both in real Life and in the manual. Color coding, perhaps? With the
retention ring in place, the next step was to drop the water block down onto
our CPU and snap the two together with a retention clip. From there, finishing
the install was as easy as tightening four screws. Installing the radiator was
also easy, and involved using the four pairs of provided screws to sandwich the
radiator between the fans and attach them to the case. Both fans connect to a
Y-shaped PWM power cable, allowing them to run synchronously from a single 4-pin
connector.
With
our retention plate already in place, we only had to secure four screws to the
coolers retention ring.
In testing, the cooler performed
surprisingly well when we let it run at full-speed (fan control disabled),
outperforming our Hyper 212 Evo zero-point air-cooler by an impressive 5 C, but
it was about 3 C warmer than the similarly constructed Corsair H80 kit. In
quiet mode, using PWM fan control, its performance was also impressive, but
again it was not as capable as Corsair’s offering.
Thermaltake
WATER2.0 Performer.
While the Water2.O’s performance is coot,
its acoustics aren’t. In quiet mode it emitted a high-pitched humming noise,
even at idle, and under load the hum became more pronounced. The humming sound
went away when we ran the fans at full speed, but then the fan noise was so
loud as to resemble a small wind tunnel inside our chassis.
Overall, the Water2.O Pro definitely runs
cool, but at the cost of excessive noise in either of its modes. Considering
the similarly priced H80 runs a bit cooler, we’d give the nod to Corsair’s
solution for a 12cm-based all-in-one water cooler.
