Thermaltake Bigwater SE

Thermaltake’s Bigwater is already known to our readers as it was covered in our previous review of consumer-class liquid-cooling systems (for details see the article called Four Liquid-Cooling Systems for the Masses ), so I won’t dwell long on water-blocks, pipes, fasteners and such as they were all described in detail earlier. Nothing seems to have changed in the updated system at first:

But on a closer inspection I found that the system had acquired an expansion tank and a new pump:

The new pump is of course the more interesting component of the two:

I don’t have detailed information about the characteristics of the older pump, so I can only say definitely that the new pump is better or worse after I test it in action. What I can say is that it is smaller and heavier than the older one (see the specification below). The curiously designed expansion tank is installed into a 5.25” bay of the PC case:

The fittings will be inside the system case and the coolant level indicator on the front panel, but how do you fill this system up?

You can only fill it after you take the tank halfway out of the bay. The plug remains inaccessible otherwise. Despite the fact that you have to move the tank, the filling procedure has become more convenient. You just pour some coolant into the tank and pump the system up. That’s all and there is only one hitch – there are no labels on the pump to tell you what fitting is for input and what fitting is for output of the coolant. If you connect the pump’s input to the top fitting on the tank, the system just won’t work. I couldn’t find anywhere in the manual what fitting acted as input and had to determine this experimentally with a couple of pipes and a mug of water. So, if you do like this system and plan to purchase it, here’s some undocumented info: the lower fitting is an input and the upper fitting is an output as shown on the snapshot of the pump above.

The other components of the system (radiator, water-block, fasteners, etc) have remained unchanged, so you can refer to our earlier review for details.