asetek Waterchill Xternal Kit

INTRODUCTION

About a year ago, I put together this little gaming beastie I call Aeryn. At the time, a single-core AMD Athlon 64 4000+ (San Diego) processor overclocked on a 939 motherboard was a good platform to have for a gaming rig. The Thermalright XP-90C heatsink that I got to cool the CPU proved to be efficient and overall, when compared to similar setups such as my own, I was generally pleased with its thermal reduction capabilities. Gaming was good. The CPU, though overclocked 17.5%, performed flawlessly under stress testing and in all gaming activities. She was a rock solid beauty. She was hot!

Winter passed and the days eventually rolled into the hot lazy days of summer. In Central Florida, where I live, summer days are not only hot, they’re muggy to boot. It’s the kind of heat that drags you down and gets you to scrambling just to find someplace that’s cool and relaxing. Sometimes for me, that someplace was my computer room, where the gaming was good and the A/C was cool. Or, at least, it was supposed to be cool. It wasn’t cool though. It was hot!

Although my overclocked AMD CPU delivered all that I asked of it when I gamed last summer, it came at a price. And that price was heat. The innocent little gaming rig that I had put together in the chill of a cold Christmas winter’s night, which now included an XFX 7900GTX video card driving a Dell 24” LCD at maxed out settings with the high resolutions, had become a heat making monster come the middle of last summer’s god awful heat. I turned the thermostat way down on the a/c to compensate for the extra heat being generated by my little beastie, but try as I might, I couldn’t keep up with her. Not when she’s in her full frag glory. She bellows like a furnace. The case that I used for my gaming rig came with two 80mm intake fans and three 80mm exhaust fans, but that just wasn’t enough. I even added a third 80mm intake fan on the CPU side of the case to help with my heat dissipation problem. That helped a little, but not much. I needed more help. Things were too hot. I needed to cool things down.

It was about that time that I started to think about watercooling. Though watercooling wasn’t on the top of my things to do list, I did manage to put some time and effort into it by doing my research as I always do whenever I am interested in something and thinking about tackling the unknown. And for me, tackling the unknown always has a certain fear factor associated with it.

I was a watercooling neophyte and somewhat fearful, so I started out by reading how-to’s and tutorials on watercooling and then reviews on watercooling related products such as waterblocks or watercooling kits. After I got a feel for the basics of watercooling and what it’s all about, I began to frequent some of the hardware forums on the Internet. As my reading continued and I digested the various thoughts and opinions on watercooling techniques and equipment, my own conclusions were formulating.

Since my current motherboard uses a heatpipe on the chipset, I decided that the cooling solution provided by Asus was sufficient. And since my XFX video card’s warranty would become null and void if I modified it by adding a gpu waterblock, I decided that its cooling solution on it was sufficient as well. Finally, keeping in mind that I am lazy and that my primary goal was to cool the CPU that had become unbearably hot, I decided that an external watercooling kit was the best solution for me and that of all of the external kits, the asetek Waterchill Xternal kit would be the one that earned my hard earned dollars.

asetek – The Company’s Overview

Before we get started on this grand adventure, here’s some info on the company the makes the product I’m going to review for you. The following information comes straight from the asetek company website.

asetek is a company that prides itself in a simple. straight-forward approach that is conceptualized in their Mission Statement:

For as long as computers generate heat and noise, there will be a need for asetek and for the products we are developing.

Company Outline:  asetek A/S is a world leading manufacturer of vapor phase, vapor chamber and water-cooling solutions. VapoChill® / VapoChill Micro™ / WaterChill™ are designed for PC enthusiasts, gamers and professionals who demand exceptional performance, maximum reliability and low noise. The product lines are sold through a global network of authorized distributors and resellers. asetek works with world leading hardware companies to ensure maximum reliability, compatibility and performance.

“We will develop and market the best and most cost effective cooling solutions for the global channel and small form factor PC market, and continuously improve our technologies to reach market segment leadership”