Installation
We mounted the CPU wterblock on to a Gigabyte Z790 AROUS Elite X WiFi 7 motherboard. Installation was smooth and everything went accordingly with no issues at all.
We then proceeded to mount 360 radiator on the top of the Hyte Y70 chassis. Again, we didn’t encounter any issues. I love the Hyte Y70 chassis, it’s got so much room inside!
Since there are no 4-pin PWM fan or 3-pin ARGB cables on any of the magnetic cooling fans, just make sure connect them firmly together. Once all 3 fans are fully connected, you’ll need to attach the magnetic header cable at the end of the “daisy-chain” to one end of the radiator (see photo no.4)
The CPU waterblock can be installed in any orientation, as long as the mounting brackets are correctly installed. You can easily correct the display’s orientation at any time by rotating it via the Gigabyte Control Center, which you can download from their website.
Gigabyte Control Center
The Gigabyte Control Center software, can also be used to synchronize the whole setup with other AORUS devices. Here you can monitor fan and pump speeds, clock frequencies, utilization, temperatures and more.
With 40MB of storage, you can personalize the LCD display with your own text/GIF/JPEG/MP4 files or use any of the 5 modes of animation, which is already included.
Test setup and Testing Methodology
The system used for testing is listed in the table below. Ambient temperatures were kept at 24 degrees Celsius +/- 1 degree. We used the included thermal paste, which I think is more than adequate. The fan speed was set to default. The idle temperatures were recorded after 10 minutes of idle and max temperatures were recorded after a 5 minute torture test using Adia 64 CPU System Stability Test and recording the Cores values and taking the average.
| CPU | Intel Core i9-14900K |
| Cooling | Gigabyte AORUS WATERFORCE X II 360 ICEAIO Liquid Cooler |
| Motherboard | Gigabyte Z790 AROUS Elite X WiFi 7 |
| Cooling Fans | Gigabyte 120mm ARGB Fans with EZ-Chain Mag (included) |
| Ram | Corsair Dominator Titanium DDR5-7200 32GB Memory Kit |
| SSD | Lexar NM800 Pro 2TB |
| PSU | Gigabyte UD1000GM PG5 (Rev. 2.0) 80 Plus Gold 1000W |
| VGA | Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER |
| OS | Windows 11 |
Idle Temps
For our tests, we used our very toasty Intel Core i9-14900K processor which has a default TDP of 125W. With no workload on the CPU … idle temps were quite low at only 35 degrees Celsius. Nothing out of the ordinary here.
Load Temps
At 100% CPU load, the temperatures reached a high of between of 97-100 degrees Celsius for the CPU package. The E-Cores maxed out at 95 degrees Celsius, while the P-Cores hit between 94 to 100 degrees Celsius,
These high temperature readings were no surprise to us. That’s because we all know that Intel’s 13th and 14th Gen processors run extremely hot due to its insanely high Turbo Boost TDP of 253+W (full load). And if you look carefully below (bottom left), you can see that the CPU’s max power consumption actually hit 345W!
We highly recommend you use a 360 AIO cooler for Intel’s latest 14th Gen processors.
Now lets move on to the Conclusion and Verdict!
