Photos Part Two: The Cooler
Same basic deal as the previous Water 2.0 bits, but a larger radiator and a lot more wires coming out of the pump! Let’s look at those first.
One female fan plug to go on the motherboard and power this operation, two male PWM fan connectors and a USB plug to go straight on your motherboard. Be aware that if you have an old motherboard that can only cough up an amp on the fan connector, you may want to use a Molex-Fan Connector adapter to power this operation, as it’ll use more than an amp at full burn. You won’t lose control of the fans as they’re controlled via the USB plug. I recommend against trying to control the pump and fans via the three pin connector on your motherboard.
Same old pump externally:
Internally it’s different, but that’s for the next page.
Here’s the base with the (excellent) thermal paste that comes on it stock, as well as bare.
It’s not flat, but it’s not built to be flat either. It’s machined with a slight dome in the middle to make absolutely sure that the area right over the CPU die is making good contact. This is important in general and absolutely crucial in the case of modern Ivy Bridge CPUs. They have a tiny, but hot, die right in the middle of the heatspreader. As I mentioned, the thermal paste that comes preinstalled is excellent. I’ve tested it twice before on the other Water 2.0 parts and am not going to repeat that testing as I already know that it will stomp the Arctic Alumina Ceramique 2 that I use for my comparisons.
The pump with the mounts on it looks like this:
Nothing new here. If you’re using LGA2011 it will screw directly to the CPU socket. All other sockets you’ll need to use the backplate.
The radiator continues to not be small:
See? Told you it’s not small. On my 22″ 1680×1050 monitor this is almost exactly life sized, for whatever that is worth.
Now when I went to install the unit the first part, mounting the pump, was a snap. Thermaltake did a good job on the mounts. The second part however is awkward. I’m using a Thermaltake Armor Revo case and the case is built for a 200mm fan in the top. It has screw holes for 2x140mm and 2x120mm fans, but the 2x120mm mounting holes are further apart than they are on the radiator. To make matters worse the radiator+fan combo is about 0.25″ too thick to clear the (excessively large) MOSFET heatsinks on my Z77X-UD5H motherboard. The result is that I wasn’t able to use all the stock fan mounting holes, but I was able to securely mount the radiator. It just looks a bit funny.
This part worked great. The hoses are at the top of the pump when the case is upright, I’ve found them to be happiest there.
Note the locations of the screws, there was absolutely no way to mount this the “correct” way in this case. This method clears the MOSFET heatsinks and is quite secure however, so it’s good enough for me.
From the inside it looks normal:
Wire management is a bit tricky though.
One more page of photos, this time with the top pulled off the pump housing!
