It’s no secret that all contemporary components of the system case may generate a lot of heat and proper cooling is vitally important for the system to be in good health. Insufficient cooling may result in a physical damage of hardware caused by overheating.

Air cooling solutions are the most popular today. They are simple, low cost and quite reliable. Chips that require heat takeoff bear aluminum or copper heatsinks. Thanks to their large surface heatsinks dissipate the heat into the air quite effectively. Sometimes, it’s not enough, though. To improve heat dissipation, either the surface of the heatsink is enlarged or the air is directed along its ribs. As we can’t go the first way for long because the system case has limited dimensions, the second way became more popular. Everyone now knows what a cooler is: a device combining a heatsink and a fan, which is pumping air along the heatsink’s surface.

The most powerful heat generator among PC components is the processor. That’s why CPU cooling is so much spoken about and CPU coolers have become ever more expensive and sophisticated products. A good modern cooler that would guarantee effective heat dissipation even during extreme CPU overclocking usually has a copper heatsink weighing a few hundred grams and a powerful fan. But a good cooler is only half of the thing. It’s also necessary to create proper air in- and outtake in the chassis, otherwise the air will circulate through the fans heating up even more and reducing cooling effectiveness.

To avoid this undesirable effect the user has to install additional fans to suck the air in and blow it out, thus turning the system case into a kind of a desktop (or underdesk) wind tunnel. This tunnel will roar no less than a real one, believe me.

Powerful graphics cards also require active cooling, system chipsets don’t like overheating as well, a 7200rpm hard disk drive also generates a lot of heat… The number of fans in the chassis is growing and each fan contributes its tune to the overall chorus. What the poor user can do? If we disregard the possible compromises, there are two ways-out. First: to sacrifice high speeds for the sake of silence and “downgrade” to a VIA Epia system or something like that. The second way is to give up air cooling altogether and install a water cooling solution.

So, this is what the review is all about. Before we start we would like to thank ATACOM for the opportunity to test a PC2-C system from Koolance Company, which specializes in water cooling solutions. As every other Koolance creation, it has certain unique features, which we will try to reveal and discuss in detail in our review. We suggest starting with a discussion of the water cooling in general, and then we will pass over to all the pros and contras of the Koolance PC2-C system.