Thermaltake Silent Water Cooling Kit

The Unit

On first removing the Silent Water from the box, the odd feeling of having the water block already connected to the radiator/pump assembly really grabbed me.  I'm so used to measuring and cutting hose and putting it all together, you almost feel robbed when you discover all of this work is already done for you.  Before we look more closely at the individual pieces, let me touch on the water hoses.  Each hose is roughly 600mm long which is plenty of line to reach from the radiator mounting point to the socket.  The line length was more than adequate but not excessive.  If you are worrying about kinking hoses, don't.  While I didn't measure the actual thickness of the line, short of folding it over like a garden hose wouldn't misshape it enough to inhibit water flow.

The face of the radiator/pump assembly is all business.  The orange bladed Tt 120mm fan really accents nicely against the copper brazed reservoir.  Notice how the water inlets and outlets off the reservoir are tubular sections of copper and not prefab connectors.  Small butterfly clamps keep things in place.  Pulling and tugging on the connection gave us a confident feel that everything will stay just where its supposed to.  In the right most pic, you can see how one of the lines breaks off to a third connection that is capped.  While this branching line wasn't covered in the instruction manual, I'm assuming it is to allow the addition of a GPU water block if desired.

On the back, we can get a better look at the aluminum convection fins and mounting holes drilled into the Silent Water's frame.  These holes allow for a few different combinations of mounting to the rear exhaust fan area of a case.  At first glance I thought the holes were laid out for 80, 90 and 120mm mountings; they are not.  If the end user mounts the Tt Silent Water to a rear exhaust area, their case really needs to have a 120mm exhaust fan.  I tried and was able to mount it in a few other cases taking 80 and 90mm fans but this is by no means universal.  The good thing is that if you have a small case that doesn't give the clearance necessary (163 x 120 x 38mm) you can always use the Velcro and mount the unit on the floor of your rig.

Here we find the pump's and fan's power connectors which are 3-pin and 4-pin plugs respectively.  The white braided cover over the majority of the fan's 4-pin line was a nice bonus to keep cables looking clean but black cable sheathing would have looked much cleaner.

The water block is a brazed copper number with Thermaltake's logo stamped on top.  Hose ends are mated with the same butterfly clamps just as on the radiator and were similarly fit snugly on.  Flipping things over we find a nice lap job on the base that showed no irregularities nor could we feel any imperfections with our fingers.  (Gee, aren't those some hip looking case badges...)

Installation

Installation turned out to be even faster than I expected.  The only time consuming part of installation of removal of the mainboard so the bottom mounting bracket could be installed.  A few years ago, removal of a mainboard would have been a huge ding on a product's overall score.  However, with most all air and water cooling solutions requiring mainboard removal we now view this as a minor inconvenience.

One mounting plate goes below the mainboard and the other is above with the board, processor and water block sandwiched between.  The top plate actually screws into the water block directly with two tiny screws to avert any movement.  Mounting the radiator/fan assembly was a no brainer, ultra quick task.  No unusual line routing problems were experienced in the least.

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