Titan TWC-A04 Water Cooler Kit

Manufacturer: Titan
Supplied by: Titan
Street Price: $199 

by Dean Barker  (7/01/2004)

Introduction

Water cooling kits are readily available most places.  Which one you choose depends on what your needs are.  Are you looking for extreme cooling or the path to silence?  Several manufacturers are producing all in one kits geared toward ease of installation as well as favoring near silent operation over all out performance.  One such kit is Titan's TWC-A04.  The Titan unit brings several features together to make the TWC-A04 stand out.  Today, we are fortunate enough to have one of these kits on the bench to pick apart and see what's what.  Without further delay, let's get to it.

What you get

Titan has built their water cooling kit around an external unit, which has proved to be very successful as evidenced by Thermaltake and Corsair.  Titan has taken this successful thinking one step further.  Their unit is sized so that it can be used externally or internally.  The central unit measures 144 (W) x 240 (D) x 85mm (H).  This sizing allows it to be installed into two open 5.25" drive bays, provided of course you don't have the drive holders on the drive cage itself.

Included in the kit are a CPU and VGA water block, central pump/radiator unit, secondary radiator unit, coolant, six lengths of 5/16" OD tubing with fittings as well as an absolute ton of parts allowing the TWC-A04 to be applicable to the Intel P4, AMD K7 or AMD K8.  Notice in the second pic below how Titan has labeled each bag by a letter and number.  With the parts needed for the TWC-A04 to be installed on three types of platforms, it is easy to get confused.  The manual which did a good job of explaining installation and operation, worked beautifully with its reference to specific parts called for during installation by the bag numbering. 

  

Central Pump/Radiator

This main part of the TWC-A04 is the Central Pump/Radiator unit.  Titan has looked at keeping things simple.  The front bezel has vents at the top and bottom through which you can see radiator fins.  Centered between these vents are the reservoir fill cap, LCD Control/Monitoring Display and a silver rheostat for manual fan control. 

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