Thermaltake BigWater Water Cooling Kit

Performance

With Thermaltake's BigWater kit being aimed at providing higher performance without sacrificing too much in the way of extra noise, we decided to throw it in with the big dog water coolers.  Our comparison unit today is the Asetek L20 water cooling kit.  The only item used with the L20 that was not included with it was a Criticool WaterPlant Reservoir (6").  The large reservoir gives the Asetek kit a bit of an advantage by increasing the volume of the water in that system.  However, this is a realistic comparison system many of you will be looking at in the sub $150 range.

The results of our tests are graphed below.  These are the result of five runs per cooler with the highest and lowest result for each cooler being thrown out.  The remaining three were then averaged and charted here.  The water cooling systems were switched after each test.  Load temperatures was obtained by running SiSoft Sandra Pro 2004's burn in module for 30 minutes and recording the temperature via the mainboard's onboard sensor.  Generic silicon thermal paste was used as our interface material.  Thermaltake's coolant was also used in both systems.  Ambient temperature was 21 degrees Celsius and did not vary more than .6 degrees during all testing.  The same Tt 120mm fan was used with both systems and was run at full speed.

Test Bed

• Intel 2.4GHz Pentium 4 ‘C’ chip @ 3.3GHz / 1.875 volts

• ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe mainboard

• Corsair TwinX 1024 XMS4400 DDR

• Inno3D GeForce 5700 Ultra

• Seagate 120gb SATA HDD

• Lian Li PC-V1100 Case

• Windows XP Pro with all patches and Service Pack 1 installed

Let me explain something before we go further.  I want to be clear that after each test run, the water cooling system was removed and the comparison system then installed.  This was done to eliminate any possible variance because of installation.  We used the same coolant in both systems as well.  I'm reiterating this because the results of our testing actually stunned me.  Read on to see what I mean.

Results

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Pg 1 - Introduction
Pg 2 - Components
Pg 3 - Installation
Pg 4 - Performance
Pg 5 - Conclusion