Assembly, Filling, Turning On

It’s no hard job to put this system together, but you will certainly need such overclocker’s qualities as patience and perseverance. The water hose doesn’t come cut into multiple pieces of required length, but is supplied as a water hose coil of a considerable length, which ensures some reserve in case you cut it wrong. To avoid such mistakes, you should install the water units and pipes after you put all the components in their proper places. Then it’s easy to determine the length of each pipe segment.

After you cut the hose into pieces, you can start putting together the water contour. The pipe between the tank with pumps and the heatsink is already in place, you only need to connect the four water units. To fasten the hose at the connecting pipes, you should use some tricky clamps: basically, you don’t screw, but wring them out with pliers or some similar tool:

We applied those clamps to all hose coupling with water units, except the CPU water unit. As we have said, the pipes of this unit look too fragile, and, moreover, the pipes are wide and the hose holds on very tightly even without clamps. We connected the water units in the following order: CPU - chipset - GPU - HDD. The resulting system is shown on the picture below:

We only have to add some water now. The filling hole is located at the bottom of the case and is closed with a screw-top. Koolance warns that you should use only distilled water in the system. However, I didn’t feel like running around the district in the middle of the night looking for distilled water and took the risk of using some purified drinking water from the bottle instead. The system took in about half a liter. Following the manual, we also added some ethylene glycol from the small bottle that comes with the system:

After I turned the system on, I heard a clear babbling sound produced by the air coming along the pipes and some really annoying noise generated by the pumps. I was about to get utterly disappointed: where was the promised silence? But it turned out that air bubbles didn’t let the system take enough water. After the pumps started working, the water level in the tank dropped. The in-taking pump started mixing air and water producing those horrifying sounds. I simply added water up to the specified mark on the tank, and the noise disappeared immediately.

Well now, the system is assembled and ready to work. Let’s test it.

Testbed and Results

We used the following testbed:

• Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz CPU;
• ASUS P4S8X mainboard;
• Albatron MX480 graphics card (NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440-8x GPU);
• Floppy disk drive;
• CD-ROM drive;
• Hard disk drive.

The test was carried out in Windows XP. We started the system and left it idle for two hours to check the temperature in the “idle” mode. Then we ran a deathmatch with bots in Unreal Tournament 2003 for two hours, too. That was the temperature value in the “burn” mode. Water temperature measurements were taken by means of the thermal diode included into the Koolance system. Air temperature was 20 ^oC during the test; the water cooling system was set to the “silent” mode. Here are the results: