Installation

Before you begin to install the system into your PC case, you should make up your mind as to where you’ll put the cooling system’s heatsink. The installation guide suggests several possible positions, but none of them seems good to me. Here’s why.

First, the heatsink can be installed into a free 5-inch bay at the top part of the PC case.

But from where will the fans be getting fresh air to cool the heatsink? The zone of optical drives is the most stagnant zone in a standard ATX case, with no or little movement of air. This could be improved by installing an intake fan instead of the PC case’s front-panel faceplates, but this solution is not aesthetic and creates an extra source of noise. And by the way, where am I supposed to install my optical drives?

Second, the heatsink can be installed into a 3-inch bay (cage) for hard drives:

This seems to be good in terms of efficiency. The fan at the bottom of the PC case’s front panel will be supplying fresh air to the heatsink’s 70mm fans. I started out with this very installation method, but realized after half an hour of testing that the position of the heatsink had to be changed. The heatsink’s area being small and there being very little coolant in the system, the air rising from the heatsink was so hot that the hand wouldn’t stand it over a couple of seconds. This heater would be welcome for a truck driver on a freezing-cold night, but not for my hard drive. Moreover, all the hot air remains inside the PC case (well, it remains in there irrespective of the place of the heatsink).

Third, the heatsink can be installed at the bottom of the side panel of the PC case to exhaust air outwards.

That’s probably the best variant if you’ve got a rectangular 70x140mm embrasure in the side panel. You don’t have one? Well, I don’t have it, too. And I didn’t want to ruin the side panel just to test the cooler.

The fourth installation variant is to put the heatsink into a free PCI slot of your mainboard using the included textolite bar.

Not the best solution in terms of efficiency, yet it’s better than the first two and doesn’t require you to spoil your PC case as the third variant does. So, I installed the system’s heatsink into a PCI slot for my tests.

After you’ve made up your mind about the position of the heatsink, you can install the water-block on the graphics card. As I said above, the water-block can be installed on all modern graphics cards. The Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX is the only card that is missing in the compatibility list, but I’ve got one. It is a Sparkle Calibre P880+ which features a high-performance cooling system with a Peltier element. Well, it’s going to be interesting to compare the liquid cooling with the thermoelectric one.

It’s easy to mount the water-block on that card’s GPU. Just remove the steel frame around the G80’s heat-spreader and screw fastening poles into the two openings. Then mount the water-block on these poles.

As you see, the base of the water-block doesn’t fully cover the G80’s heat-spreader, but the opponent to the Aquagate Viva has the same drawback, too, so they are under identical conditions.