shifts Posted April 12, 2006 Share Posted April 12, 2006 I came across this rather nifty bit of kit over in the online store there Thermaltake CL-W0052 Tide Water VGA Liquid Cooling (link) The idea of this item is to give Thermaltake a chance to get into the watercooling and clocking territory doing what they do quite well, making a reasonable product for a cheap price It immediately appealed to me as Im using a phase change setup to cool my cpu which unfortunately due to the type of case im using doesnt leave much space for watercooling bits and pieces for my gpu and at this price i thought why the hell not!! :D Installation was a breeze, almost and i mean almost anyone could do it, although one word of advice which almost got me was with the installation of the block on my ati x1900xt, the installation is described seperately for the ati & nvidia cards, ati traditionally use a 2 screw mount system and most nvidia now use 4 mounts, as it turns out my x1900 does too so I followed the nvidia instructions :) The only problem with the device for my setup was that to install it internally as its design is that it requires to be slotted into 2 pci slots and fixed in place like a pci cardm as my mobo only has 2 32bit pci card slots and im using one for my x-fi sound card ive just mounted it externally for now (the pipes are plently long and flexable enough to do so) The tests I went through to test this were idle temps with the stock cooler, idle temps with the Tide Water Cooler installed, load temps with the stock cooler and load temps with the Tide Water Cooler installed, the results as far as im concerned speak for themselves. Here are the idle temps at default speeds Stock cooler on left, Tide Water on right At drop of 10C isnt anything to be sniffed at, room conditions remained the same, so was well impressed with that. Here are the load temps beginning at defaultspeeds but using ati tool to increase the core speed to put load on the GPU Stock cooler on top, Tide Water on bottom An even bigger drop of 21C under load, that was running ati tool to find the max core clock for approx 5 mins, i left it running for 15 mins and the temp didnt rise, so all in all I cant recommend this product enough and is certainly worth the money especially at Specialtechs prices, the only downside is you loose 2 pci slots, if you dont use any then thats no problem, but even if you do like me external or alternative mouting isnt out of the question. Value for money 5 out of 5 Performance 4 out of 5 (only because nothing in this world will ever be perfect) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
XerXis Posted April 12, 2006 Share Posted April 12, 2006 impressive performance i must say, a drop of 21 C could mean a longer lifetime for your gpu (not that i ever had a gpu failing on me) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Enisada Posted April 13, 2006 Share Posted April 13, 2006 Hmm very interesting. Quite the temp drops, may have to pick one of these up. Hows the overclocking? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chconline Veteran Posted April 13, 2006 Veteran Share Posted April 13, 2006 lol nice I should get one... for review too :p Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Smigit Posted April 15, 2006 Share Posted April 15, 2006 Interesting, I always assumed these wouldnt be all that great, at least compared to a higher end full system water kit. Nice to see you got some decent results out of it but. I love my zalman something-a-rather, I duno if I could ever really stick with stock cooling anymore after seeing the difference this fan made compared to stock. Thats unless the VGA card came with a high end fan but most dont appear to. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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