X-bit labs

New Liquid-Cooling Systems from Thermaltake and More! (page 9)

Category: Coolers

by Vasily Melnik

[ 02/22/2007 | 11:20 AM ]

Assembly Tips

There should be no problems for a user who has already assembled liquid cooling kits. You should only remember about the stiffness of the pipes. They don’t bend willingly and may even break at a certain angle. Unfortunately, the pipes don’t have any means to avoid overbending like springs or something. Moreover, when you attach the pipe to a fitting, the pipe gets twisted, so it is best to connect the system components with pipes only after you’ve installed them in their respective places in the system case. It is easier then to select the optimal pipe length and avoid much bending. By the way, the pipes get so adapted to the pressure nuts after two or three hours of working under load that it becomes impossible to unfasten the latter without a spanner.

These are in fact all the pitfalls you may encounter. It’s simple to fill the assembled system up: fill the expansion tank to the full, pump the system up, add some more coolant, and then pump it up again. That’s all. Considering the additional accessories, I’ve got a few different configurations. The first configuration, hereafter called System 1, is a system with a top-end air cooler, a Thermaltake Big Typhoon:

System 2 is the BigWater 745 in its minimum configuration (that is, what you have if you buy the 735 model):

It includes a water-block, a pump, and a radiator. Nothing more. My special thanks go to Thermaltake for the new thumbscrews.

It is now much easier to fasten the water-block than with the previous cooling kits from Thermaltake. The super-bright blue spotlight in the pump is rather a drawback:

You’ll have small blue dots dancing in your eyes long after you’ve taken a look at it. Yes, indication is important, but it shouldn’t be that bright! And you can have it in a simpler way by connecting the pump’s signal cable to a standard 3-pin fan connector on the mainboard and set the warning sensor up in such a way that it woke up at speeds below 1000rpm (the speed was always within 1800-1900rpm during my tests).

System 3 is the previous kit plus an additional radiator:

The only downside is that I ran short of the coolant even though I hadn’t used all the length of the included pipes. So I had to borrow half a bottle of coolant from the junior system for my tests.

I guess that each system must be shipped with at least 1 liter of coolant because it’s hard to purchase it separately.