Thermaltake Bigwater 760i Water Cooling Kit

The water block and its mounting bracket are pure pleasure.  The 'H' type mounting bracket allows for a variety of applications of the block.  It's no wonder that Thermaltake hasn't changed this design in years because it works exceptionally well.  The block itself is constructed of pure copper and is ultra slim.  This is the slimmest water block I may have ever seen.

As expected, the base of the block was perfectly smooth with an excellent lapping job.

Installation

Mounting the Bigwater 760i was very straight forward and intuitive.  The instructions are detailed enough for most engineers to be happy with not that you need an engineering degree to read them.  Motherboard removal is necessary though unfortunately.  A plate identical to the 'H' plate shown below is mounted under the mainboard and allows for a sandwiching of the water block in between.  The block can be turned and mounted so the hose connections have more clearance if needed.  Remember the 13 and 1/2 feet of hose we got?  Looks like I only needed six inches.  The rightmost pic below really spells out how the quick connect connectors help out with installation. 

Under power the blue LED 120mm fan gives off a soft glow behind the screen on the bezel.

Performance

Our comparison cooler for testing today is the Tt MaxOrb with its fan speed set to low.  By our using the same comparison cooler in all our heatsink reviews you can extrapolate one cooler review to another here at the OC Cafe'.  Both cooler systems will be installed and run five times by placing our Core 2 Duo processor cores at 100% load by way of SiSoft Sandra's XI Burn In Module for 30 minutes with a final temperature reading taken at the end.  The highest and lowest results will be thrown out and the remaining three will be averaged and graphed.  ThermalRight Chill Factor Thermal Paste will be used in all tests.   Ambient room temperature at time of testing remained within one half a degree of 22.6 degrees C.  Our Tt Bigwater 760i unit's fan speed is graphed below at its low speed setting.

Test Bed

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