by Kirill
02/03/2005 | 05:13 PM
Water-based cooling systems for personal computers first appeared about half a decade ago. Like in many “enthusiast-oriented” market sectors, everything was started by a few fans who were trying to improve the parameters of their own PCs. Water cooling was going to remove both heat and noise problems. Overclockers needed efficient cooling and relative quiet too, since multiple-fan monsters were unbearably noisy. So they had to turn to the high heat-conductive properties of water for the answer.
Early water-based cooling systems were hand-made out of car radiators, aquarium pumps and homemade water-blocks and reservoirs. This approach to water cooling still exists and is actively discussed on topical forums. Yet for a few years already ready-made solutions are available, too. A number of manufacturers are offering complete systems ranging from budget to the hi-end level as well as various components (water-blocks, pumps, radiators and so on) out of which you can assemble a custom-made system for your specific needs. Water-based cooling of the graphics core or of the mainboard’s chipset isn’t a sensation anymore and some companies even suggest that you cool your hard drives and power supplies this way, too, and offer appropriate kits.
The U.S.-based Swiftech is among the most prominent players in the market of liquid cooling systems for the PC. Founded in 1994, the company was at first involved in tech support of serious UNIX machines, but later changed its field of action completely. Swiftech was among the first companies to introduce serial water-cooling systems and has been constantly innovating ever since. They are realizing the newest technological advances in their products to ensure their maximum efficiency, reliability and cost-efficiency. To cut in short, Swiftech is a recognized leader of this market since its inception.
In 2004 Swiftech’s product range was complemented with the H20-120 series, and this kit became the first hi-end water cooling system that our test labs ever received. To adequately evaluate this Swiftech’s solution we compared it to two widespread systems, Aucma CoolRiver 3 and Titan Watercooler TWC-A04. Let’s see if Swiftech can show anything exceptional in comparison with these ordinary water cooling kits.
Swiftech MCX6000 water-block
Swiftech MCP650 pump
Swiftech MCB120 “Radbox” radiator
Fan
Swiftech ships its products in an original double packaging: a cardboard box with the components of the system is additionally parceled into a large box with protective material to ensure safe delivery.
The box contents include:
The first thing different in the H20-120-P in comparison to previous products from the same company is the water block (the system comes with a single CPU block, but Swiftech offers a full assortment of various water-blocks).
The MCW6000 is an opposite of Swiftech’s typical design with an aluminum cap on a copper sole: this water-block is all made of copper type C110 and all its parts are dead-welded to each other. This gives you full protection against leakages and, moreover, this all-copper water-block isn’t subject to galvanic corrosion. Swiftech claims 100-percent quality control as each block is tested under a pressure of 1.7 atmospheres.
The 281 pins of the “thin-pin-design” base of the block are placed in a square. The input opening is located in the center to ensure the best heat takeoff – the water stream is driven right to the hottest spot, to the CPU core. This design of the water-block (massive all-copper block, thin pins and a central input nipple) is among the most efficient. The sole of the block is excellently polished off – not to mirror shine, which is not actually important for effective heat transfer, but to an ideal flatness of the surface.
The dimensions of the block have become smaller: the sole now is a 64x64mm square. By simply replacing the fastening you can mount the block on any modern processor from Intel or AMD: kits for installing the MCW6000 on Socket 478, LGA775, Socket 603/604 (Xeon), Socket 754/939/940, and Socket A are all available. We got a fastening for Socket 478 which proved to be very handy – you don’t have to take the mainboard out of the system case to install the water-block. There is a minor inconvenience, though, but which will hardly trouble ordinary users. You notice it when you frequently change your central processor – you have to detach the water-block from the system to install the fastening for another platform.
The company says the engineers pursued five parameters when designing the MCW6000: performance, reliability, compatibility, ease of use, and price. Swiftech wanted to reduce the manufacturing cost of the product without compromising the traditionally high performance.
The pump you receive as part of the system is called MCP650. In spite of the numbers in its name, the power of the pump is 1200 liter per hour and this is its true power, unlike with many low-end products. The pump consumes 17 watts from a standard 12-volt Molex connector. Of course, this adds to the load on the power supply, but you don’t have to worry about connecting the pump to the power grid. The manufacturer claims the pump is 33-34dB loud, which is quite humane towards the user.
Other advantages are small size and easy fastening. The pump can be glued or fastened to the system case with four screws or you can just take its fastening off (and reduce the dimensions of the device considerably) and put the pump anywhere you like. The pump is promised to have a 5-year lifecycle, which by far exceeds the lifecycle of cheap aquarium pumps (“no-name” pumps seldom live more than one year).
The H20-120-P’s default heatsink from Swiftech follows the traditional “Black Ice” design of modern water-cooling systems. It is a two-pass radiator with copper ribs, specifically developed for PC water cooling systems. Having 157x133x25mm dimensions, it is intended for the installation of a single 120mm fan (the fan comes from Delta, yet another legendary manufacturer). The fan has a low speed (2100rpm) and its airflow is only 75CFM, but its noise is minimal.
The manufacturer says the maximum dissipated power of this radiator is 440 watts and judging by our tests and the excellent behavior of the system under a load of 250 watts, this number is quite true to life.
The Swiftech model differs from analogous constructions of that type in its exclusive blue-metallic coloring. This coating is good, and the radiator looks really cool.
Swiftech’s innovation is a special fastening called RadBox, new in the H20-120-P. This special metallic “cage” has holes for the installation of a fan and a heatsink on one side, while on its other side there are mounting holes to fasten the whole assembly on the system case. This solution is going to be most welcome for owners of small cases where there’s little free space inside.
To place the radiator outside, you install a special adapter into a PCI slot.
The fill & bleed kit is the last component of the system. The design with three inlet valves gives the solution a very industrial-like look. It’s not easy to grasp how this apparatus works without reading the user manual, but a system with this filling mechanism is easier to operate. Next revisions of the Swiftech H20-120 come with a reservoir to increase the amount of liquid in the system. This accessory is very useful, but thanks to the thick pipes the amount of liquid without the reservoir is about half a liter, which is quite sufficient.
The special liquid Swiftech HydrX doesn’t only disinfect the water, but also shines green in ultraviolet light – modders should appreciate this feature. Two meters of transparent vinyl pipes from Kuriyama are enclosed with the system; their outer diameter is 1/2”, and the inner is 3/8”. The pipes passed out stress-test – the system was working for a month on non-distilled water – excellently, without becoming dim or changing their color, as often happens. Swiftech also includes protective plastic coils Coolsleeves to avoid the pipes getting twisted. There’s no actually great need for those Coolsleeves as the pipes have thick walls and are not prone to kinking.
I want to specially mention the excellently written user manual. It covers all the details of the process of assembling and installing the H20-120-P, and even an inexperienced user shouldn’t find it difficult to follow the instructions and make everything right. Of course the assembly is going to take more time than with low-end cooling systems (like those two that we use for the comparison’s sake), but the result is simply incomparable. Just regard this procedure as a real tuning of your PC. :)
We use a specially designed testbed called Judge MARK 300 to explore various cooling systems. Using a field transistor in a metal casing as a heating element, we can accurately control the load on the cooling system. The testbed can send from 25 to 300 watts of power to the heating element. We read the temperature from a thermal sensor installed in the center of the element, and so we get data which are close to those of a real processor with the same heat dissipation. Our results are more accurate than those you would get with a real processor and mainboard as there’s no dependence on the CPU load (not all programs can load the CPU to the full, while we can select any wattage we need), and there’s no inaccuracy associated with the hardware monitoring systems of mainboards which are not very precise. You can easily see that by comparing mainboards from different manufacturers under the same conditions – the temperatures and voltages are going to be different. We are safeguarded from such errors and get data which are compatible among different cooling systems and also reflect the reality.
The ambient temperature of 20°C is maintained artificially in the room. There’s no additional air cooling (save for the default air cooling of the reviewed cooling system). We use KPT-9 paste as a thermal interface between the heating element and the cooler.
The cooling system is mounted on the testbed and the temperature is read under zero load. Then the testbed is turned on to output a min load (25 watts), and the system works for 10 minutes before we write down the temperature data. Then we are increasing the load to 50, 75, 100, 125, 150, 175, 200, 225 and 250 watts every 10 minutes or we stop if the heating element becomes more than 80°C hot. We take the temperature data at the end of each 10-minute interval and then increase the load further – our experiments show that 10 minutes is enough for the temperature of the heating element to stabilize after a load growth of 25 watts. After 250W we return to the minimal load (25W) and measure the temperature after 1, 5 and 10 minutes more to check out the inertia of the system. After that the testbed (not the system!) is turned off and we make the last measurement of the temperature under zero load, a minute after we have stopped the testbed.
We also perform a max load test. We find the precise value of load when the system maintains a stable temperature of 80°C. Our requirement is the lack of deviations into either side for 10 minutes.
We took two inexpensive water cooling systems for the comparison’s sake. A $130 all-in-one Aucma CoolRiver system cools the CPU, graphics card and the North Bridge, keeping the noise at minimum. The recently released Titan TWC-A04 is curious for its effective and original design.
We constructed a diagram of the performance of the Swiftech H20-120-P according to the above-described methodology in the said modes.
As you see, we couldn’t crush this system. Even under the maximum load of 250 watts (it’s not a typo, it is two hundred and fifty watts!) the temperature of the heating element never exceeded 55°C!
Of course such a high load is a purely theoretical one when we’re speaking about the central processor, but we shouldn’t forget about the rest of the system’s components. For example, the dissipated power of a computer with an AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 processor, an nForce4 SLI-based mainboard and two GeForce 6800 graphics cards would be close to that value. You shouldn’t even try to cool such a computer with an ordinary water cooling system lest it should boil up under a load of 250 watts!
I’d like to note, too, that it’s harder to remove 250 watts of power from one source than a total of 250 watts from four components, so the efficiency of the Swiftech H20-120-P is going to be even a little bit higher in a real environment.
The second area of application of such advanced systems is the use of water cooling in conjunction with thermo-electric cooling modules, widely known as Peltier elements. The “heat pump” allows cooling a component to temperatures below the room one (although not as effectively as phase-change systems would do), but it itself dissipates twice more heat than the device being cooled. Thus, you will have to dissipate 200 watts to cool a 100W processor! It’s here that the exceptional qualities of the water cooling solution from Swiftech come in most handy. Moreover, the company is almost the only supplier of a wide spectrum of serial solutions for thermo-electric cooling of the PC, offering kits for different CPUs and (what’s even more valuable!) for graphics cards, as well as special power supplies. We hope we will be able to examine the consumer qualities of one such advanced kit from Swiftech soon.
The performance of the Swiftech H20-120-P is so impressive that it makes us rethink all our concepts concerning water-based cooling at large. “Consumer” water-cooling systems just can’t offer efficiency like that to those users who don’t just need a complex solution, but aim at the maximum performance. True enthusiasts can choose from much more serious solutions, and one of the leaders in this market is Swiftech.
The product can be described as “industrial”. The extremely powerful pump (with true 1200 liters per hour), the well-designed radiator and water-block, the thick pipes and the “professional” filling and bleeding system all say that the system is targeted at serious users. The noise remains low at that (quieter than the Titan TWC-A04, but louder than the Aucma CoolRiver 3), while the installation is no problem at all if you just take the trouble of reading the manual. Also unlike low-end systems there are numerous exclusive accessories for the Swiftech system, including water-blocks with Peltier elements.
Grades:
We’re going to offer this table in each future test of water-cooling systems. We don’t make any allowances for inexpensive systems – the best grade goes to excellent products, irrespective of their price.
Highs:
Lows:
The Swiftech H20-120-P is a product of highest quality that costs each cent of the money you are asked to pay for it. It is water-based cooling as it is meant to be!