Thermaltake Symphony Water Cooling Kit

Moving on to the water block we find what superficially looks like a no frills copper block.  After a few seconds you can see this is not the case.  The copper block is marked with Thermaltake’s familiar logo and an unusual water inlet and outlet port set up.  A small copper tube protrudes to form a hose fitting.  The spring wrapping you see covers about 30mm of a ¼” OD hose that is then fitted into the 1/2" OD line familiar to the rest of the system.  The springs keep lines from kinking and subsequently causing what we will nicely style as "flow issues."  Check out the killer lapping job of the base Thermaltake has done here.  Outstanding!

One item of note here is that Thermaltake cites their water block as having an acrylic cover with a blue LED in the manual.  As you can see above, our review unit did not have any acrylic cover or LEDs.  I can only speculate that the retail unit that will be available soon, will either have this or you will see this part of the manual be amended.

The hose ends opposite the water block side have shaped fittings with two locking nuts.  Remember this is an external kit so your water lines are piped outside the case via a holed slot cover.  The top lock nut is removed so the hose fitting can be fed through the slot cover.  Things are then locked in place by screwing down the first locking nut tightly on the other side of the bracket.  No flex, no worry.

Installation

Installation of the Thermaltake Symphony almost boils completely down to the mounting of the water block.  With the reservoir, radiator and pumps inside the cooling tower and ready to go, all that is left is the easy stuff.  The universal mounting brackets are the same type we have seen in numerous other Tt kits and continue to receive our admiration.  Here are a few shots of our mounting the Tt Symphony block on our P4 478 pin test bed.

One of the chromed 'H' shaped mounting bracket goes underneath the mainboard along with some like shaped insulation pieces.  Screws run up from this lower bracket giving the user four posts to lower the top bracket on to, over the water block positioned on the processor.  The whole assembly is straight forward and very intuitive.  What's more, is that this same bracket can be used on a variety of boards and platforms with its numerous mounting hole configurations drilled into it.  This is provided your board has the mounting holes in the PCB around the socket; otherwise you are SOL.  Installation for all the boards we fitted the water block to went without incident and I don't see why the block and its mounting wouldn't be almost, if not 100% compatible with any board sporting holes around its socket.
 

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