X-bit labs

Cooler Master Aquagate Viva Liquid Cooling System Review (page 7)

Category: Coolers

by Sergey Lepilov

[ 02/02/2007 | 09:40 AM ]

Noise

The Aquagate Viva started up without a hitch and even surprised me with its noiselessness in the first 10-12 minutes after the start. The heatsink fans were rotating at 1300-1400rpm, producing little noise (which is expectable for 70mm fans at such a low speed). The pump was barely audible, too. The specified level of noise, 20dBA, seems to be true-to-life.

But after those 10-12 minutes, even without any load on the CPU (or GPU, it doesn’t matter) the temperature of the coolant grew up and the heatsink fans reacted immediately. They accelerated to full speed in about 15 minutes more, producing a lot of noise. It was next to unbearable to work at the computer then.

Perhaps such a loud noise is compensated by high performance. Let’s check it out.

Thermal Performance

Tested on Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX

As we have already mentioned above, the cooling system of the Sparkle Calibre P880+ graphics card is based on the Peltier element, and the heatsink seems to be hanging on the heatpipes coming out of the base:

This sandwich cools the GeForce 8800 GTX GPU by about 14^oC better than the standard cooling system, however, the fans generate a lot of noise.

Let’s take a look at the results:

Thus, the liquid cooling system is inferior to the thermoelectric one. The difference in the GPU temperature is 6°C. Is the Aquagate Viva better than the reference cooler of the GeForce 8800 GTX? I guess it is, but the reference cooler works much quieter than the Viva while the minor reduction of temperature is unlikely to improve the graphics card’s overclockability.

So, it’s clear the Aquagate Viva can’t provide any significant improvement for the graphics card. Let’s see what it can do with a CPU.

Tested on an Intel Core 2 Duo

The CPU frequency growth was limited by the performance of the Aquagate Viva. The highest stable frequency of our Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 was 3.3GHz (with a core voltage increase from the default 1.325 to 1.4V). Not only super-coolers, but even the humble, inexpensive and quiet Cooler Master Hyper TX allows to overclock the CPU like that. I took the latter cooler as the opponent to the Aquagate Viva in this test. The test was performed in a closed PC case. Here are the results:

There’s nothing to comment upon. If an ordinary low-end cooler costing $27-30 is 9°C better than a liquid cooling system while producing less noise, the latter has no chance to find its customer, especially among overclockers.