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Perfect Silence: Zalman Reserator 2 Fanless Liquid-Cooling System Review (page 7)

Category: Coolers

by Sergey Lepilov

[ 04/25/2007 | 09:59 AM ]

Assembly Tips

The assembly process is described in detail in the included manual, yet there are some things that need a special mention.

First of all, you should attach the included feet to the radiator:

The feet have rubber soles so that the radiator didn’t scratch the surface you put it on.

Next, you connect the input and output fittings with the included pump-up pipe, pour the coolant (you should dilute the concentrate with water in 1:4 proportion) and pump the system through:

This seems to be simple in the photographs: the pipe was empty, but now is full. Well, it’s not as simple as it seems. Besides being powered from a wall outlet, the Reserator 2 is also connected to a Molex connector of your PSU. But it’s not convenient to start the system case up when you are pumping the Reserator through and the computer is dismantled. Zalman included a closing wire you can plug into the PSU’s 24-pin power plug (to the green and black contacts) to wake the PSU up so that it sent power to its Molex connectors.

It’s simpler if you haven’t yet dismantled your computer and installed the CPU and VGA water-blocks – you can just pump the Reserator 2 up by simply starting your PSU.

The pumping-up process is illustrated thus:

Take note that you have to tilt the radiator by 70 degrees from the vertical to fill in all the hollows in it. It’s only after that that all air will leave the system and the pump will begin to move the coolant around. If the liquid is not being pumped through, the system protection wakes up, emitting a warning sound and shutting the system down. If this happens to you, make sure you’ve done everything right and restart the system, tilting the radiator again.

When this is done over with, you disconnect the short pipe from the radiator (the fittings have valves that prevent liquid from leaking out of the radiator as well as out of the pipes) and take off the fittings from it. The fittings sit so tight that I had to cut the ends of the pipe to take them off.

Then you should decide upon the place of the radiator and your system case. The manufacturer mentions this specifically in the manual: