by Kirill "ALT-F13" Balalin
12/02/2005 | 03:57 PM
In the summer of 2004 the overclocking community was grieved to hear the news of the Danish company nVENTIV (earlier known as Chip-Con), one of the two leading manufacturers of phase-change PC cooling systems, having gone bankrupt. Their Mach II had been a hit on the extreme cooling market, and its tuned-up version Mach II GT was the most powerful CPU cooler ever to be in serial production.
<%BANNER[article]%>Alas, despite all the advantages of Mach II series systems their production was eventually found unprofitable and nVENTIV had to leave the market. There were rumors that some Japanese firm bought all of the company assets and that nVENTIV would soon return, but these were mere rumors indeed. Asetek (the owner of the VapoChill trademark) stayed as the only manufacturer of Freon coolers for the PC.
So you can imagine the extent of my joy when this year I received an e-mail from Klavs Steenhof, the ex-PR manager at nVENTIV, who informed me of their coming back to business again! The assets of the bankrupt nVENTIV were bought out by their long-time partner Elcold, a Danish manufacturer of refrigerating equipment, and the new owner reestablished the RND team and started up a new company under the name of Extreme Cooling Technologies (ECT). I would say that the name speaks for itself!
nVENTIV’s product range, which at the end consisted of three products (the basic Mach II, the “tuned-up“ Mach II GT and the cheaper Mach II ST), has got shorter as they do not offer the “value” version anymore. Instead, ECT offers a renewed list of available CPU kits, i.e. the evaporator fasteners for different CPU sockets. And the most surprising news is that the recommended retail price of the products has also been considerably reduced when the systems came to production again!
All the true devotees of nVENTIV’s products should also be thrilled at the news of the return of the legendary “Prometeia” trademark. That was the name of the first Freon cooler from Chip-Con (that model is usually referred to as “Mach I” today), but when the company changed its name to nVENTIV, they abandoned the well-promoted brand and the official product name of “Chip-Con Prometeia Mach II” transformed into the simple “nVENTIV Mach II”. Well, the affectionate nickname “Prommy” or “Prommie” had already come to be strongly associated with any product from Chip-Con/nVENTIV, and now Extreme Cooling Technologies puts the famous brand forth again – their new systems have the word Prometeia in their name!
Besides selling the new systems, Extreme Cooling Technologies offer technical support for systems sold by Chip-Con and nVENTIV which is very good news for all long-time customers and partners of the Danish company.
We should not expect any changes in the product range any time soon. Phase-change cooling systems are a rather conservative market and the originally clever design ensures high efficiency of the modern Prometeia models. It is just impossible to improve much on the performance of the Mach II GT. In near future, ECT will only be adding new CPU fasteners when new-generation platforms arrive.
The object of our tests today is an extremely top-end offer from Extreme Cooling Technologies: a Prometeia Mach II GT system in an aluminum casing designed by Lian-Li accompanied with a special version of the Lian-Li PC-60 middle-tower system case. I should acknowledge that this solution is not as exclusive today as it used to be at the time of nVENTIV, but this is even good. Those very few nVENTIV Mach II GT systems produced were sold by the distributors at fabulous prices (this cooler + system case kit would have easily cost $1500, I think) and were scarcely available anywhere. Today, the price of the most feature-rich version of the kit is below $1000.
Here is a brief specification of the device:
The whole thing is contained in a box of a really huge size, more like the size of a medium refrigerator than of a PC system case.
The system comes preassembled, including the external aluminum panels from Lian-Li and a modified Lian-Li PC-60 case installed on top. This explains the large dimensions of the package. So you get the following things all told:
Besides that, we’ve got two additional CPU kits, for Socket 754/939/940 and LGA775.
The user’s manual is quite detailed about all the aspects of using the system, from the technical characteristics and assembly to the list of possible troubles and ways to eliminate them.
Unlike the Asetek VapoChill XE, the product from Extreme Cooling Technologies is designed in a completely different way, being placed under a PC case:
Thanks to the stylish aluminum case, the assembled system makes a tremendous impression. The standard version of the Mach II and Mach II GT includes a black middle-tower system case from Enlight of rather out-dated design, component layout and functionality (Prometeia series systems have been shipping with such cases since the very start of their production in 2001) and the cooler’s casing matches the color of the Enlight case. However, since 2003 there has been available an alternative, premium version of the exterior design: the Mach II is accompanied with a superb aluminum Lian-Li PC-60 system case and the cooler itself has an aluminum casing which is also manufactured by Lian-Li. It is this premium version of the Prometeia that we got in our hands.
The Lian-Li PC-60 that comes with the Freon cooler differs from the standard version in one, yet very important detail – there is a cut in the bottom panel for the cooler’s flexible “trunk”. Apart from that, it is the well-known high-quality middle-tower system case, a classic model from the very inventors of the aluminum PC case concept.
The short list of the features of the Lian-Li PC-60 would mention the removable mounting plates for the mainboard and the power supply, thumbscrews everywhere, an additional rack for 4 hard disk drives, 4 preinstalled 80mm fans (including the top one), and a sufficient number of open bays (four 5.25” and three 3.5” bays, to be exact). The interior is designed properly and permits to assemble a very complex system, even though it doesn’t give you as much room as full tower cases do. Giving a more detailed description would mean going beyond the scope of this review, especially as the model does not differ much from the standard version of the same system case. On the whole, the choice of the Lian-Li PC-60 is right and gives no cause for complaints.
The aluminum casing of the Prometeia Mach II GT is manufactured by Lian-Li too, so it suits their system cases perfectly. Since the Lian-Li PC-60 is longer and wider than the original system case from Enlight, the aluminum panels are fastened to the chassis through additional intricately shaped bars.
There is only one imperfection in the whole “Lian-Li for Prometeia” concept from the PC enthusiast’s point of view. Many users of high-end PC hardware prefer to assemble their computers in full-tower system cases just because they offer more useful room. Lian Li’s product range includes the splendid PC-70 model which is designed in the same style and fully meets the requirements to a “really big PC case”. However, full towers are longer than ordinary cases, so putting a Prometeia in the aluminum casing under a PC-70 wouldn’t be a very aesthetic solution. But this problem could be easily solved by producing a version of the cooler with longer side panels! I think this would increase the appeal of the Lian-Li + Prometeia kit for many users. Well, you cannot call this a defect – I’m just putting forward an improvement suggestion.
The cooler unit is fastened to the system case with four solid-looking screws. By the way, you must not carry the assembled system by the top: the aluminum panels may get deformed around those screws due to the very heavy bottom. Generally speaking, it is really troublesome to move the system around because the weight is huge (even if compared with the Asetek VapoChill XE), and the whole arrangement is not at all suited for transportation.
After undoing the above-mentioned screws, we took the casing off the cooler unit – the tests were all performed on an open testbed. The only thing that goes beyond the chassis’s dimensions is the heat-insulated flexible hose with the evaporator on its end.
The evaporator’s design differs dramatically from the design of the VapoChill XE (and the hose is also much handier and more reliable than the copper tube employed in the Asetek product). This square-shaped evaporator resembles the water-block of a liquid-cooling system. The massive plastic casing not only provides effective thermal insulation of the evaporator but also contains an 8W heater element to keep the external side of the casing hotter so that moisture would not condense there. In the next section we will discuss how the evaporator is fastened on the CPU using one of the different CPU kits.
To take off the side panels of the casing you must undo 8 screws on each side. This gives you access to the system’s innards. There are no user-serviceable components there, so we strongly advise you not to touch anything unless you do know how to handle cooling equipment!
The system is dominated by the mighty compressor NF11F from Danfoss. Note that both ECT and Asetek chose Danfoss’ products as the foundation for their phase-change coolers. The compressor is powered from the electric mains (220V in our case and 110V in the American version), so the power supply is freed from that burden (this is a very big advantage because the VapoChill XE set forth very strict requirements about the computer’s power supply).
The compressor is supposed to work with the R134a gas which is indeed used in ECT’s Prometeia Mach 2 coolers. The more advanced “GT” version employs the more efficient R404a refrigerant. This means harder operating conditions for the compressor (it heats up more, for example), but the load still remains within the acceptable range, while the performance of the “tuned-up” cooler is much higher than of the standard version.
Curiously, the condenser employed in the Mach II GT is exactly the same as in the VapoChill XE – this is another point where the products from the competing companies meet! The condenser is made of copper, with aluminum ribs. The necessary air flow is created by the 120mm 85CFM fan from Sunon. Another such fan is installed on the rear panel of the unit to exhaust the air.
The controller’s card is the electronic center of the system. Generally speaking, off-the-shelf systems differ from homemade ones in the advanced control and monitoring tools in the first head. The controller does the following:
The controller is powered through an ordinary Molex connector: although the compressor receives power from the electric mains, the electronics is all powered by the computer’s PSU. The total consumption is low, however, as the power goes only to two fans, one LCD screen, and the controller’s logic.
The 5-pin connector is attached to a USB header on the mainboard. The OS “sees” the new device and, after the driver is installed, allows you to control the Prometeia Mach II GT “on the fly”.
The 2x20 characters LCD screen on the front panel of the cooler unit displays various information messages. By default it gives you a string with the name of the system and a string with the evaporator temperature. You can reprogram the display with the help of an included utility.
Besides a power connector and a 120mm fan, there are 4 LED indicators of the system status on the rear panel. The user’s manual will tell you what the various combinations of the indicators mean.
The evaporator is to be fastened to the mainboard by means of a CPU kit. There are kits to install the Mach II and GT on Socket A, Socket 478, LGA775, and Socket 754/939/940.
We’ve got three kits at our disposal, with the exception of the virtually useless Socket A.
Each CPU kit consists of:
The assembly and installation process doesn’t ask you to do anything irreversible (what discouraged some people in the VapoChill XE was the necessity to daub the socket with thermal paste and glue insulation right to the mainboard!) We performed the installation on a Socket LGA775, but it’s all the same with the other two sockets. It may take quite a long time at first, but later on you’ll learn to install the system much faster.
The whole procedure will keep a prepared man busy for about 10 minutes. And frankly speaking, it is not much harder than installing some air coolers (like ASUS StarIce or Scythe NCU-2005, for example).
When you turn the system on, the compressor begins to cool the gas (R404a) to the necessary temperature. The computer starts up at -33C° evaporation temperature by default. In average, the computer begins to work in about 2 minutes after you push down the Power button.
When the PC is shut down or when there’s no voltage from the computer’s PSU, the compressor halts in about 5 seconds. We checked out “hot unplugging” (by disconnecting the power cord during work) a few times and had no problems, but we do not recommend you to repeat our experiments! In any case, when the system is shut down, the restart delay timer does not allow you to turn it on sooner than after 120 seconds – this measure ensures more or less normal operating conditions for the compressor.
Our methodology of testing cooling systems implies measuring the temperatures of the heater element at different thermal loads created by a special testbed. This approach helps to accurately evaluate the performance of air coolers or water-cooling systems for which the temperature achieved is equivalent of efficiency. However, this traditional method does not produce understandable results with vapor phase-change cooling systems and other super-efficient cooling solutions for the PC. The fact that under a load of 200W the heater element temperature is -10°C does not tell anything comprehensible to the user. It does not make clear the value of extreme cooling and does not explain how the CPU core behaves under such conditions. So, instead of a brief “theoretical” test of the temperature modes, we carried out an extensive exploration of the operation of the ECT Prometeia Mach II GT on overclocked processors.
We tested the Mach II GT on as many as thirteen different processors and five different platforms and we were never disappointed. The temperature reduction down to 0°C and lower most positively affects the overclockability of any CPU. The diagram below shows you the overclocking gain the Prometeia provides over the maximum frequency a processor can achieve with air-based cooling. In each case the extreme cooling helps to reach a frequency which is absolutely unattainable for the given CPU core with an air cooler or a water-cooling system.
Here is a list of tested systems (the CPU model, core, and the mainboard):
The low result of the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.73GHz is explained by our reaching the maximum FSB frequency the mainboard could support (350MHz is too high a FSB frequency even for an ASUS P5WD2 Premium). The same thing happened with the Pentium M: our i855GME-based mainboard could not yield a FSB frequency above 160MHz.
The AMD64 platform on average showed a 400MHz gain over the maximum frequency of the core with air cooling. This gain was achieved on nearly all of the tested AMD processors irrespective of the stepping.
It’s harder to see a solid trend on the Intel platform, but owners of modern Prescott/Prescott-2M CPUs, i.e. steppings E0 and N0, respectively, are going to enjoy a whopping 800-1000MHz frequency gain above the maximum frequency achieved with air-based cooling.
As for the thermal conditions, there are two values you should take your bearings from: the CPU temperature (according to the built-in sensor) and the evaporator temperature (the number displayed on the front LCD display of the cooler unit).
Let’s start with the evaporator temperature. Unfortunately, there is no linear correlation between it and the real temperature of the CPU, so you can’t use the data from the Evaporator Temp sensor for continuous thermal monitoring. Under a small load (for example, a Pentium M processor with a TDP of about 30W), the difference between the ambient and evaporator temperatures is about 80°C. This is a strict correlation: suppose there’s -55°C on the evaporator at +25°C in the room, then the evaporation temperature is going to be -65° if the room temperature is lowered to +15°C. It means that the cooling efficiency is going to be somewhat lower in summer, but on the other hand, the enthusiasts will be able to squeeze an extra hundred megahertz in winter by ensuring a low ambient temperature.
The highest temperature of the evaporator we observed during our tests was -33°C – that was with a Pentium 4 660 overclocked to 5.1GHz at 1.65Vcore. On average, when the extremely overclocked processor is under a high load, the temperature of the evaporator varies from -36°C (an Athlon 64 FX-57 @ 3550MHz at an air temperature of +35°C) to -45°C (a Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.2GHz @ 4300MHz). When the CPU’s subunits are mostly idle (like in typical office applications), the temperature goes lower still by 5-10°C. For comparison: the minimal evaporator temperature of the earlier tested Asetek VapoChill XE was -32°C and the average range was -10 to -20°C (at +20°C air temperature). Well, the Prometeia Mach II GT is a direct rival to another cooling monster, the VapoChill LightSpeed [AC], rather than to the mentioned XE.
By the way, the picture drawn above does not refer to the Pentium M. Thanks to the very low heat dissipation of this processor (in comparison with the desktop monsters) the evaporator temperature always remained at -54-55°C during our tests irrespective of the load, clock rate or Vcore! The ECT Prometeia Mach II GT just doesn’t seem to feel the difference between taking off 10W of heat (in the idle mode) and 45W of heat (at 2700MHz clock rate and 1.6V voltage) – this cooler was developed with much higher loads in mind!
The manufacturer supplies detailed data about the “reference” testing of the Mach II and Mach II GT on a special testbed with an accurate control over the thermal load. The temperatures given are very close to what we got in our own tests, which does credit to the vendor: ECT publishes real-life data!
The CPU temperature is somewhat harder to work with. Many mainboards (particularly, from AOpen and Gigabyte) cannot correctly recognize below-zero CPU temperatures which makes any monitoring impossible. It is not ECT’s problem, of course, but the mainboard developers’ who did not take the trouble of making the thermal sensor operable under such conditions. The problem is partially solved in mainboards from other vendors, for example in those from ASUS (which we mostly used to test the Mach II GT). ASUS mainboards give you a more or less correct temperature down to -36°, but at the lower temperatures they just show you -111.5°C at once, irrespective of the real temperature of the CPU. Well, even when the chip that processes the data from the CPU-integrated thermal diode behaves reasonably, you should not trust it too much: the measurement error range is larger at lower-than-zero temperatures.
Thus, the minimum CPU temperature we could be sure of was -36°C, although the real temperature might have been a few degrees lower. The temperature of the Pentium M might even be as low as -45°C, but we could not make sure about that due to the problems with the AOpen mainboard. The average temperature of a processor working under normal conditions was usually -25-30°C, depending on the frequency and voltage, if we don’t count in the extraordinary result of the test of one of the earliest samples of the Prescott (3.2GHz, Socket 478), a product of the “thermonuclear oven” class, for which -10°C was the normal temperature. We don’t even publish the result of this test in the table above because, fortunately, few people bought this “CPU marvel” for use.
Under full load and at the maximum frequency, the Pentium 4 660 proved to be the hardest trial for the Prometeia (quite naturally, considering its impressive frequency of 5100MHz and high heat dissipation). Its temperature was -8°C. The temperature of the other processors varied at overclocking from -10°C to -25°C.
During all the time we were using the Prometeia we never had any technical troubles. With any PC configurations and under any temperature conditions (including long operation in summer heat and under high humidity) our Prometeia Mach II GT worked without a hitch, ensuing high performance and giving us no problems at all. This behavior was a nice surprise after the rather capricious Asetek VapoChill XE.
The fasteners are sufficiently robust for an average user: the evaporator and other details are in ideal condition even after a hundred install/uninstall cycles, except for the screws – their cross-like dents wear off after 15-20 cycles, so you should still be careful during installation.
The use of phase-change cooling systems for the PC means an absolutely new level of performance at overclocking, absolutely unattainable with the traditional cooling methods. We are very glad the premium products of the Prometeia series are again available for purchase. These coolers enjoy a tremendous success among PC enthusiasts and now that we have tested one ourselves we understand why the Prommie has acquired a cult following. This is the true hardcore in the “home” sector of the IT industry.
We wish luck to people at Extreme Cooling Technologies who are continuing nVENTIV’s traditions of developing and supporting the most efficient off-the-shelf cooling systems for computers.
Highs:
Lows:
The ECT Prometeia Mach II GT and the additional CPU kits were provided by the manufacturer, Extreme Cooling Technologies. We would like to personally thank Klavs Steenhof, the chief product officer, for being extremely supportive all this time!
