Testbed and Methods

It’s easy to test a liquid-cooling system. Putting aside the problems of assembly and filling, you don’t need a real system case as a testbed. Since the heat is transferred to the outside anyway, you don’t have to deploy the cooling system in a system case to check its efficiency. As for the assembly procedure, there’s not much sense in verifying how the system deploys since this will largely depend on the type and the internal design of the particular system case.

So, I tested the efficiency of the reviewed liquid-cooling systems with a top-end configuration that included:

• Intel i955X mainboard
• Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 2.8GHz CPU (Smithfield core)
• 2x512MB Kingston KHX5400D2/512 DDR2 SDRAM
• ATI RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition 256MB
• Western Digital WD1600JB hard disk drive
• Zippy HP2-6460P power supply

There were two test modes: Idle and Burn (with two copies of CPU Burn running). The temperature of the CPU was read with Motherboard Monitor version 5.3.7.0. The room temperature was 20°C at the time of the tests and remained constant throughout them. I used the same thermal paste with all the tested cooling systems.

The level of noise is evaluated subjectively and is specifically mentioned for each liquid-cooling system. If it was possible to adjust the fan speed, I tested the system at different fan speeds, depending on the system’s capabilities.