X-bit labs

Water-Cooling Systems Roundup: 16 Systems Reviewed! (page 14)

Category: Coolers

by Kirill "ALT-F13" Balalin

[ 03/30/2006 | 08:48 AM ]

ProModz Cooled Silence Extreme Package

The ProModz team is not new to the PC market. They already have very top-class modding projects under their belt and currently the team is busy designing and manufacturing high-quality water-cooling systems. Let’s see if they can beat the long-established leaders of this market.

The Cooled Silence Extreme Package is shipped in three boxes, each sealed with a holographic stamp that bears the manufacturer’s logo. So, it’s not a fake!

The kit includes three water-blocks, a big radiator, a pump, an acrylic reservoir and pipes. The Aucma Coolriver includes the same number of water-blocks but of much inferior quality.

The aquarium pump Hydor Seltz L30 is the highest-performing one in this review. Its specified performance is 1200 liters per hour and it yielded 400lps in this liquid-cooling system, which is the highest result among all the pumps from the tested kits.

Even the WaterChill radiator looks less impressive as it is two times thinner than the ProModz one. Running a little ahead, we’d want to tell you that we tested both these radiators with a single system and the Black Ice from the WaterChill did 1-2°C worse depending on the dissipated power (Asetek has thicker radiators in its product range, however, so you can always upgrade your WaterChill if necessary).

The reservoir is supposed to go into a 5.25” bay of your system case. It has three outputs for the pipes and a fill-up opening in the top. To our surprise, the plugs let the water leak out. This is a serious defect and an odd one for an off-the-shelf product, but the developers have assured us that this problem has been corrected and the new reservoirs do not leak.

We don’t use more than one water-block in this test session, so we tested the system with only its CPU water-block installed. The water-block itself is designed and made well; the protective coating prevents corrosion and chemical reactions between the coolant and the copper.

Of course we expected the system to deliver a high performance, yet the results were so high as to be shocking! The ProModz Cooled Silence Extreme Package beats every other system included in this review. The heater’s temperature had never been so low on our testbed! As for the noise factor, we used the fans from the Asetek WaterChill kit and the noise was low enough. The only thing missing in this system is a fan speed controller. You don’t need that much of performance always, while lowering the fan speed would make the system almost silent without compromising its performance much.

Summary: The ProModz Cooled Silence Extreme Package is an outstanding kit if we put aside the leaking reservoir problem. We recommend it for purchase if its price of $270 doesn’t seem too high for you. This kit can easily cool any modern or upcoming processor. If it is indeed too expensive for you, consider the simpler and more affordable models from the same Cooled Silence series.