X-bit labs

Entry Level Liquid-Cooling System vs. Hi-End Air Cooler: Swiftech H2O-220 Compact Review (page 4)

Category: Coolers

by Sergey Lepilov

[ 03/24/2008 | 01:15 PM ]

Water Block

The next component worth mentioning is the water block combined with the pump, which is called Apogee Drive 350:

This very compact liquid-cooling unit consists of a copper water block and a pump with two nipples that have been carefully covered with orange plastic caps:

The ceramic pump bearing should serve you for 50,000 hours. The pump power is claimed to be at 300 l/h. When you get your Swiftech H₂O-220 Compact, the water block will be preassembled for LGA 775 mainboards and comes with the corresponding backplate:

If you need to install this water block onto mainboards designed for K8 platform, you will have to replace the bottom part of the water block with a different one bundled with the system. In this case all you need is to unscrew the copper base and then the removable plastic lower part of the block:

Our liquid-cooling systems expert – overclocker eastSiR helped us determine through a hole in the base of the pump, that Swiftech H₂O-220 Compact uses a new revision of high-quality Laing DDC 3.1 pump with lowered voltage.

The copper base is actually pretty standard for Apogee GT series: it is designed as an array of small diamond-shaped pins:

The water block base surface that comes in contact with the processor heat-spreader is finished quite nicely, although it is far from being polished off enough:

The most important thing, however, is that it is impeccably even, which we have checked with our standard thermal compound imprint method on the glass surface.

The pump and water block unit is connected with two cables: one for pump rotor rotation speed monitoring and another for power supply that plugs into a standard Molex connector of your system PSU: