WaterChill CPU/VGA/Chipset Power kit - KT12A-L30

Introduction

Is it me or do we get more and more fans in our systems for each year? When I started using PC’s you usually had 1 fan on the PSU and nothing more. Today it isn’t usual that you have 2-3 casefans, a huge fan on the CPU, a big noisy fan on the video card and even in some cases a fan on the motherboard chipset. While all these fans do help removing heat from the computer they also introduce a lot of noise.

But what if you want a quiet system and still need to keep it cool, possible because you want to overclock the CPU and/or the videocard? In that case watercooling can be the solution. While the idea of putting water into a system full of electrical components might not seem like a great idea, watercooling non-the-less has caught on and today you can find complete kits both for novices and experts.

The kit I am reviewing today comes directly from cooling experts Asetek and is called: WaterChill CPU/VGA/Chipset Power kit - KT12A-L30. This is a kit that not only provides cooling for the CPU but also for the videocard and the motherboard chipset.

About watercooling

Watercooling and aircooling in basic uses the same principle. A medium is used to remove heat from an object. In one case the medium is air, in the other the medium is water. The big difference is in how much heat each of them can carry and how good it conducts heat. Water is about 25 times better when it comes to conducting heat which means that it removes a lot more heat from the object it is cooling than air.

The basic theory behind watercooling is that water is pushed into a waterblock on the component it is supposed to cool. The waterblock usually has a thin copper or aluminium bottom, which is applied to the CPU/GPU. The interior of the waterblock usually is designed to make the water turbulent inside the block as well as presenting as large an area as possible to the water. When the water comes in contact with the interior it is warmed up and moves heat away from the component. The warm water is then pumped to a radiator whose task it is to cool down the water again. The radiator has an extremely large amount of endlessly curved tubing inside thin metal fins. The water warms up these fins and air is blown over these fins to remove the heat. The water is then pumped round again.

As you might understand the lowest water-temperature you can expect is the same as the room temperature. Since this normally is substantially below the temperature of the CPU it is usually quite enough for effective cooling. You can of course put several waterblocks in sequence before pumping the water to the radiator. Some people claim that you always should put the CPU last in such a sequence since it warms up the water the most but according to calculations even a 80W CPU won’t increase the temperature of the water more than ~ 1C so it really shouldn’t matter in what sequence you cool your components.

There are two reasons why you would want to use watercooling.

1/ Better cooling. I’ve explained the theory above. Especially if you are overclocking, cooling becomes important. Good cooling can be the difference between a small overclocking and a larger overclocking.

2/ Lower noise. Since you remove the fan from the CPU and possibly the GPU and motherboard chipset, the system should get quieter. This all depends on the pump and the radiator though. If the pump is noisy or the radiator-fans are noisy you might end up with a noisier system than before.

Not all kits manage to be both quiet and provide good cooling and I was very interested to see how the WaterChill kit would manage.