Cooler Master Aquagate Max ESA Liquid Cooling System Review

[pckoloji]

Review is in Turkish but you can see all pictures from this address:

Review page

Here is one picture from review:

I also prepared short English summary of the review. Here it is:

Cooler Master Aquagate Max Liquid Cooling System

Updated version of Aquagate comes with ESA support.

Some time ago it was really a big problem to control heat coming from fast CPUs. Newer CPUs with 65 and 45 nm technology are much better. But if you want to have a complete professional cooling system or interested to overclock to the limits, then it is time to move from air cooling to liquid cooling. We reviewed ZEROtherm NV120 and Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme short time ago. Both were giving very good results with overclocked Core 2 Duo CPU to 3 GHz. Let's see Cooler Master Aquagate Max can do better or not?

600 Watt cooling capacity

Cooler Master is one of the leaders of PC cooling components producers. We reviewed and gave 5 stars to Cosmos ESA case. Now we have another ESA compatible product. Lets see technical specifications:

• CPU Socket: Intel Socket 775, AMD Socket 754/ 939/ 940 / AM2 / F
  
• Support Watt: 600 W
  
• Weight: 1700 g
  
• Quick install connector: 3/8 inch (9.5 mm)
  
• Water Block: 50 X 50 X 42.5 mm, copper
  
• Radiator: 300 x 142 x 71 mm, Aluminum
  
• Fan: Green LED Fan, 120 x 120 x 25 mm, 850~2400 R.P.M., 71.81 CFM, Life Expectancy 40000/hrs, 22 dBA, 4 pin PWM, 4.8 W
  
• Pump: 47 x 62 x 60 mm, H-max 2 meter, 450 L/H (Max.), Life Expectancy 50,000 hours, 23 dBA, 6.5 W
  
• Reservoir: 340 ml, 122 x 89 x 74 mm
  
• Tubing: 3/8 inch (9.5 mm), PVC
  
• Coolant: 260 ml, Glycol, -10 degree, Life Expectancy 2 years
  
• Temp. Sensor Dimensions: 98 x 20x 45 mm
  

As you can see we have a whole liquid set with every necessary part. Box is not very big and packaging is perfect. It protects all sensitive parts of the set very well. When we open package we saw small black box containing user guide and 3 meters PVC pipe. After that all other parts are visible in their special foam cells. Main box contains pomp, reservuar, flow indicator and liquid level indicator. This box takes 2 x 5.25 in? slot. This model has seperate radiator and fans. As a result performance will be better than Aquagate which contains 80 mm fan and smaller radiator in the main box. Pomp is very small and needs 8 Volt. 450 L/h capacity is more than enough. 2 meter h-max is not a problem for a normal PC case. Whole system will contain around 1 litre liquid.

CPU water block is very good and easy to install. We needed to take mainboard away from PC case to install CPU water block. It is made of copper and surface is flat and shining. One input and one output is enough for good liquid flow. Our mainboard has a small resistor at the back side. Fortunately set has two types of mainboard backplate. So we used the other one in order to prevent damage to the resistor at the back side. 300 x 142 x 71 mm radiator has 2 pieces of 120 mm fan. Cooling capacity is very high. It is made of aluminum and has many small curves to help heat dissipation. Green LED color of fans fit to the green liquid color. Fan noise is changing related to the fan speed. In order to change fan speed, you need to use ESA approved mainboard.

Raditor is not compatible with all cases. The best option is using with a case which has 2 pieces of 120 mm fan on the top side. Cosmos, Cosmos ESA and Cosmos S cases are great cases to use with this liquid cooling system. Temp sensors help system to understand situation. You can define settings with NVIDIA control panel. Fan speeds can automatically change depending on the results coming from temp sensors. 260 ml gylcol liquid cooling must be mixed 3 times volume of distilled water. We advice you to finish connections and try system for the 1st time out of the case. Observe all connections for leakeage at least 1 hour.

After installing all parts inside of your case, you need to wait air bubbles go out of system. This is normal and dont be panic when you hear noises coming from the pomp. If you gently shake radiator, bubbles may go out faster than expected. User guide is giving all necessary information for the installation. All pictures and information is clear and detailed. After all, dont forget to connect cables for power, temp sensors, radiator fans and USB motherboard connection. This set doesnt contain extra water blocks but you can easily add VGA, ram, chipset and disk blocks.

Test system>

• Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 1.8 GHz
  
• EVGA 680i ESA mainboard
  
• 2 x 1 GB A-Data Vitesta Extreme Edition DDR2-800 RAM
  
• 512 MB NVIDIA GeForce 9600GT VGA
  
• Cooler Master Cosmos ESA Case
  
• Tagan 1100 Watt PSU
  

You will see results. We compared Aquagate Max to our best air cooling solution Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme + Fander 120 mm fan. We used CPU at normal frequency and overclocked to 3 GHz (333 x 9). Measurements are done for idle mode and %100 loaded with CPU Burn. SpeedFan, CoreTemp and Intel Thermal Analysis Tool used for measuring temps. Room temperature was 24 C degree. Results show that Aquagate Max is better than our best air cooling solution. Temp differences are reaching to 11 C degrees with overclocked CPU and under %100 load. 11 C degree difference is very good. You can prepare a quiet and cool PC with this set. And we advice you to think about using VGA block too.

TOP PERFORMANCE AWARD

[SadJoker]

Nice.. I haven't seen many watercooling system reviews around. :p