by Sergey Lepilov
02/02/2007 | 09:40 AM
Cooler Master, a brand familiar to every overclocker, has recently begun to ship its new liquid cooling system called Aquagate Viva. Two things make it stand out in the crowd of off-the-shelf liquid cooling solutions. F
<%BANNER[article]%>irst, its water-block can be installed on a graphics card as well as on a CPU (the Aquagate Viva supports almost all modern graphics cards and all CPU platforms currently in use). Second, the recommended price of this product, $57, is comparable to or even cheaper than the price of super-coolers, let alone water cooling systems from other manufacturers.
We couldn’t help checking the Aquagate Viva in our labs. Let’s first see what it looks like.
The new liquid cooling system comes in a medium-sized box with a plastic handle:
The front of the box shows a full-size photo of the system in a rather curious fashion. The pictured rubber pipes connecting the system components end in a plastic window that the real, not pictured, control unit of the system can be seen through. It is emphasized that the Aquagate Viva is the world’s first liquid cooling system for graphics cards that can also be installed on the CPU.
The back side of the box gives you loads of information:
You can learn the system’s specification, view photographs of its main components accompanied with descriptions of their key features, examine the few possible ways of installation of the heatsink with fans, and even read a full list of tests the system undergoes prior to its release. I just can’t think of anything else that might be added to all this information.
There is a plastic box inside the package. Its compartments contain the system’s components:
The Aquagate Viva is shipped ready to be installed on the graphics card, so it has few accessories:
A separate small box contains components you’ll need to upgrade the system’s water-block to install it on your CPU. Here are they are:
That’s all the items you’ll find in the package. Now let’s have a closer look at the main components of the system.
The heatsink is the largest component of the Aquagate Viva. It is a common notion among overclockers that the heatsink and its fans is the vital component of a modern liquid cooling system. Cooler Master doesn’t seem to agree with that because the heatsink of the Aquagate Viva is made out of aluminum and has a modest size at 175 x 75 x 44mm.
The dimensions include the fastening frame, so the heatsink is in fact fully covered by the two 70mm fans it is equipped with and its total dissipation area measures only 140x70mm. When assembled, it weighs a mere 160g. The photo shows the screw that closes the hole for adding coolant into the system.
There are a few holes in the aluminum frame at reverse side of the heatsink. The holes are threaded and you can use them to install a couple of 70mm fans more.
If you examine the photo carefully, you can notice a couple of green dots in between the heatsink’s ribs. These are the ends of thermal sensors that help vary the speed of the fans.
The manufacturer’s name is embossed on both butt ends of the heatsink:
Each fan is secured with four screws at the corners.
The cooling system uses fans manufactured by Cooler Master itself. These fans run on a slide bearing and are marked as А7015-48RB-3AN-L1. The Aquagate Viva specification says the fan speed is automatically varied from 1000 to 4800rpm depending on the reading of the thermal sensors. The noise level changes from 20 to 37.7dBA at that. The fans provide a max airflow of 33.948CFM.
As opposed to the heatsink, the water-block is all copper. It has a round base, 40mm in diameter. In its top part there is a pump covered with a meshed aluminum plate.
The meshed plate allows the pump to be cooled by the air from the fan you install onto its top. The steel frame fastened to the water-block with four screws is replaceable. By default it is the frame to install the water-block on the graphics card (the specification promises compatibility with all Nvidia’s GPU as well as with ATI’s (now AMD’s) GPUs from the X800 and later series).
The base of the water-block is protected against scratches with polyethylene film. The base is perfectly flat and finished ideally, although not to a mirror shine.
The length and width of the water-block combined with the pump is 76 x 64mm; its thickness is 24.5mm.
The water-block weighs 180g. The pump runs on ceramic bearings that endow it with a service life of 50 thousand hours (or about 6 years of continuous operation). The rotor has a rotation speed of 2600-3100rpm at a noise level of 20dBA. The declared performance of the pump is 150lph, which is not very high by today’s standards.
The third component of the system is the control device that looks like a transparent plastic box:
This device helps you keep track of the amount of coolant in the system. There is a small card with a speaker inside and the pipe itself contains a float connected to a sensor. As soon as the level of coolant is lower than acceptable, the speaker gives you a warning by emitting a shrill squeak.
To add more coolant into the system you should use the included syringe with a special nozzle, but you don’t get any coolant since the system comes already assembled and filled up.
There’s adhesive tape on the back side of the control device.
You can use it to fasten the device anywhere in your system case. This control box also features cute blue highlighting.
These are all the components of the Aquagate Viva. They are connected with flexible opaque pipes with internal and external diameters of 6mm and 10mm, respectively. The connection spots are fixed with clamps.
Before you begin to install the system into your PC case, you should make up your mind as to where you’ll put the cooling system’s heatsink. The installation guide suggests several possible positions, but none of them seems good to me. Here’s why.
First, the heatsink can be installed into a free 5-inch bay at the top part of the PC case.
But from where will the fans be getting fresh air to cool the heatsink? The zone of optical drives is the most stagnant zone in a standard ATX case, with no or little movement of air. This could be improved by installing an intake fan instead of the PC case’s front-panel faceplates, but this solution is not aesthetic and creates an extra source of noise. And by the way, where am I supposed to install my optical drives?
Second, the heatsink can be installed into a 3-inch bay (cage) for hard drives:
This seems to be good in terms of efficiency. The fan at the bottom of the PC case’s front panel will be supplying fresh air to the heatsink’s 70mm fans. I started out with this very installation method, but realized after half an hour of testing that the position of the heatsink had to be changed. The heatsink’s area being small and there being very little coolant in the system, the air rising from the heatsink was so hot that the hand wouldn’t stand it over a couple of seconds. This heater would be welcome for a truck driver on a freezing-cold night, but not for my hard drive. Moreover, all the hot air remains inside the PC case (well, it remains in there irrespective of the place of the heatsink).
Third, the heatsink can be installed at the bottom of the side panel of the PC case to exhaust air outwards.
That’s probably the best variant if you’ve got a rectangular 70x140mm embrasure in the side panel. You don’t have one? Well, I don’t have it, too. And I didn’t want to ruin the side panel just to test the cooler.
The fourth installation variant is to put the heatsink into a free PCI slot of your mainboard using the included textolite bar.
Not the best solution in terms of efficiency, yet it’s better than the first two and doesn’t require you to spoil your PC case as the third variant does. So, I installed the system’s heatsink into a PCI slot for my tests.
After you’ve made up your mind about the position of the heatsink, you can install the water-block on the graphics card. As I said above, the water-block can be installed on all modern graphics cards. The Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX is the only card that is missing in the compatibility list, but I’ve got one. It is a Sparkle Calibre P880+ which features a high-performance cooling system with a Peltier element. Well, it’s going to be interesting to compare the liquid cooling with the thermoelectric one.
It’s easy to mount the water-block on that card’s GPU. Just remove the steel frame around the G80’s heat-spreader and screw fastening poles into the two openings. Then mount the water-block on these poles.
As you see, the base of the water-block doesn’t fully cover the G80’s heat-spreader, but the opponent to the Aquagate Viva has the same drawback, too, so they are under identical conditions.
And finally you put the decorative plate on top of the cooler:
After that, you can assemble the system in the PC case. The pipes are flexible, so the procedure isn’t as difficult as it seems. When the Aquagate Viva is in the PC case, you should connect all the connectors to the included cable and power the system up from an ordinary Molex plug of your power supply. One connector is attached to a free fan connector on your mainboard.
When installed on a GPU, the Aquagate Viva looks like that:
The PC case has become rather too crowded. That’s the price you pay for the universality and the lack of external components. These factors may be decisive for some users, though.
To install the water-block on the CPU, you should first remove the water-block’s default steel fastening frame and screw in special bushings instead:
You put another universal plate on these bushings and then fasten it with nuts to the poles you’ve inserted into the mainboard beforehand.
You have to take the mainboard out of the case to do that. Note also that the pressure plate is rather large at 104x80mm and there’s about 32mm between the mainboard and the bottom edge of the plate after installation. Thus, high capacitors or heatsinks on the chipset or on the power circuit elements may get in the way on some mainboards.
Next, you put the plastic frame on the water-block and use it to install any 80mm fan.
The arrangement is firm, and there was no vibration (I used a Noctua NF-R8 fan at its maximum speed of 1800rpm). This liquid cooling kit doesn’t include a fan, yet it is good the user is provided the option of installing one on the water-block. Cooling the near-socket space is important for a modern overclocked system.
When installed on a CPU, the Aquagate Viva looks like that:
The specification of the Cooler Master Aquagate Viva is listed in the following table:
Testbed and Methods
The new liquid cooling system from Cooler Master will be compared with the original thermoelectric cooler from the Sparkle Clibre P880+ graphics card. It’s hard to find a hotter graphics card with such an efficient native cooler. For the CPU cooling test I took a Hyper TX cooler, made by Cooler Master, too (for details see our article called Originality or Efficiency? Cooler Master Mars, Eclipse and Hyper TX Cooling Solutions Reviewed). The choice of the opponent will become clear below when you’ll see the test results.
The Aquagate Viva was tested in a closed PC case with the following configuration:
S&M version 1.8.2b was used to monitor the temperature of the Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 CPU. The CPU was heated up by means of Intel Thermal Analysis Tool for 20 minutes (according to the methodology we described in earlier review). S&M would report a 1.5°C lower temperature than the Intel Thermal Analysis Tool did in Idle mode, but their readings were identical under load.
Considering that Intel Thermal Analysis Tool provides a CPU load untypical of most ordinary applications, I also simulated a Game test mode by running 3DMark06’s Firefly Forest test with 16x anisotropic filtering and without full-screen antialiasing 19 times. This helps heat up the graphics card and the CPU both together.
The temperature was read from the sensor integrated into the CPU and GPU. The mainboards’ automatic fan speed management was disabled for the time of the tests. The thermal throttling of the Intel Core 2 Duo processor was controlled with RightMark CPU Clock Utility version 2.2 (our processor would begin to skip clock cycles on reaching a temperature of 81.5°C).
I performed at least two cycles of tests in each mode (TAT and Game). I waited for 25-30 minutes for the temperature to stabilize during each test cycle. The maximum temperature in the two test cycles was considered as the final result (if the difference was not bigger than 1°C). Despite the time aalocated for temperature stabilization, the results of the second heat-up cycle were always about 0.5-1°C higher.
The ambient temperature was monitored by means of an electric thermometer that reported all the temperature chnages within the last 6 hours. During our test session the room temperature was pretty high and stayed at at 24.0-24.5°C.
The Aquagate Viva started up without a hitch and even surprised me with its noiselessness in the first 10-12 minutes after the start. The heatsink fans were rotating at 1300-1400rpm, producing little noise (which is expectable for 70mm fans at such a low speed). The pump was barely audible, too. The specified level of noise, 20dBA, seems to be true-to-life.
But after those 10-12 minutes, even without any load on the CPU (or GPU, it doesn’t matter) the temperature of the coolant grew up and the heatsink fans reacted immediately. They accelerated to full speed in about 15 minutes more, producing a lot of noise. It was next to unbearable to work at the computer then.
Perhaps such a loud noise is compensated by high performance. Let’s check it out.
As we have already mentioned above, the cooling system of the Sparkle Calibre P880+ graphics card is based on the Peltier element, and the heatsink seems to be hanging on the heatpipes coming out of the base:
This sandwich cools the GeForce 8800 GTX GPU by about 14oC better than the standard cooling system, however, the fans generate a lot of noise.
Let’s take a look at the results:
Thus, the liquid cooling system is inferior to the thermoelectric one. The difference in the GPU temperature is 6°C. Is the Aquagate Viva better than the reference cooler of the GeForce 8800 GTX? I guess it is, but the reference cooler works much quieter than the Viva while the minor reduction of temperature is unlikely to improve the graphics card’s overclockability.
So, it’s clear the Aquagate Viva can’t provide any significant improvement for the graphics card. Let’s see what it can do with a CPU.
The CPU frequency growth was limited by the performance of the Aquagate Viva. The highest stable frequency of our Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 was 3.3GHz (with a core voltage increase from the default 1.325 to 1.4V). Not only super-coolers, but even the humble, inexpensive and quiet Cooler Master Hyper TX allows to overclock the CPU like that. I took the latter cooler as the opponent to the Aquagate Viva in this test. The test was performed in a closed PC case. Here are the results:
There’s nothing to comment upon. If an ordinary low-end cooler costing $27-30 is 9°C better than a liquid cooling system while producing less noise, the latter has no chance to find its customer, especially among overclockers.
Trying to kill two birds with one stone, Cooler Master hit neither. The new cooling system has two good points: universality (it supports all the modern CPUs and GPUs) and low price. The rest are all drawbacks that outweigh the mentioned advantages by a large margin.
The failure of the Aquagate Viva comes from its design that implies that its heatsink and fans must be placed inside the PC case. Abandoning an expansion tank to make the system compact, the manufacturer endowed it with one more defect, a very small amount of coolant. The heatsink is small to achieve the compactness and, probably, to provide for several variants of installation and is also made of aluminum to reduce the cost. As a result, the two roaring 70mm fans can’t cool it efficiently and provide performance that would be at least acceptable for overclocking.
So, it’s good the Christmas holidays are already behind – no one is likely to present you the Aquagate Viva as a gift!