Thermaltake Water 2.0 Extreme Review

Testing and Results

I tested the Water 2.0 Extreme on my 24/7 use computer, it contains the following key bits:

It’s a solid system. The Ivy Bridge CPUs use very little power and run very cool at stock, so I first overclocked the CPU to 4.1GHz using 1.120vcore. This is an easy OC that the vast majority of 3770k CPUs should be able to duplicate. It’s even (barely) doable on the stock cooler as previous reviews have shown. The real test comes when I crank the CPU speed up to 4.5GHz and pour on the volts, raising it to 1.296vcore. This is significantly more vcore than is actually needed, with the specific intention to make it run hot. This makes it a better test for the cooler.

These are the same settings as I have used in previous reviews, but I have switched to a different thermometer setup so the reviews cannot be compared 1:1. The results are still in degrees centigrade over ambient, but the thermometer measuring the ambient temperature doesn’t agree with the previous thermometer used. Both are very accurate to themselves, but the calibration of the first unit has been shown to be suspect between the last review and this one, so it has been replaced.

I tested the Water 2.0 Extreme against the excellent Phanteks PH-TC14PE that has, so far, dominated my reviews.

The results? I’ll let them speak for themselves (for the moment, anyway), here we have 4.1GHz:

Well well well, the Thermaltake Water 2.0 Extreme has won this round, handily. Due to how the Phanteks can control fan speed all the way down to a dead stop, I chose a speed level that made roughly the same amount of noise as the Water 2.0. This is not much noise at all, in case you were wondering.

How about with a more abusive heatload?

There you have it folks. We have a new Best Cooler Ever Tested!

At full speed it is definitely not silent, at low speed however you don’t give up much at all temperature wise and you have to strain to hear the fans if you aren’t right next to them. They do not whine at all at 24.6kHz PWM, and the make very little noise at low speed. There is no pump noise that I can hear outside the case, I can just barely hear it with my head inside the case.

All told, this is very impressive.

The software is pretty cool too It shows you the fan speed and water temperature, and lets you chose between Silent (the low speed scope shot above), Extreme (fans at 100%) and Custom fan speeds. There is a second tab to set the custom fan profile, you tell it the water temperature to start ramping the fan speed up at and the water temperature that the fan should be running 100% at. The selector for Silent/Extreme/Custom is a bit balky, but it works. The program itself seems to be well designed, I didn’t have any issues with it crashing even when I unplugged the pump with it running. It also does not appear to use much in the way of resources, and can be set to start at bootup or not as you see fit. No adware/etc. came with it, either. Tt did a good job. Here we have a screenshot of the controller software set to Extreme:

The sound level meter is entirely fan speed based as far as I can tell, it never went any higher as the fans never went any faster, 2000rpm being their maximum speed. The RPM readings bounce around a lot, but that isn’t especially surprising. There is also a graph page that shows you the water temperature and fan speeds. It’s a fun piece of software.