Thermaltake Symphony Mini Water Cooling Kit

The water block is a straight forward looking beauty.  No see through acrylic or fancy connections just a large block of copper with a first class lap job.  The shine on the base was so clean you can actually read the Tachymetre marks on the bezel of my SpeedMaster.

Below are the nozzle ends from the lines directly connected to the water block.  With the block mounted, these lines are secured through a pass through slot cover and locked in place with nuts on the reverse side.  Also visible on the pass through plate is a Molex plug connection to a female socket.  This connection is the power point for the Symphony Mini's dual 12v pumps.

Installation

Taking a quick look at the installation hardware for the Tt Symphony Mini goes a long way in explaining how simple this cross platform mounting hardware is.  As mentioned already, the Symphony Mini fits about everything out.  It is able to do this by use of Thermaltake's 'H' bracket.  The 'H' bracket has multiple holes through it so to sandwich a water block down between on 'H' plate on top of the block and one on the bottom of the mainboard.  Screws are run through the holes around the socket to keep the sandwich together.  Obviously, if your mainboard doesn't have the mounting holes in the PCB around your socket area, the Symphony Mini is not for you.

Our last shot before we fire things up is of the Symphony Mini's water block mounted in our P4 test bed so you can see first hand the simplicity of the 'H' bracket design.

Performance

The Symphony Mini will be tested on the same two platforms we used in the original Tt Symphony over this past summer; a P4 478 pin board and a P4 Prescott based system.  Keeping in the spirit of uniformity, we are also going to use the Tt Symphony and Tt Golden Orb II as our comparison products.  Each cooler was put under a 100% for five 30 minute runs with a half hour of the system being powered off between runs to allow things to settle down to room temperature.  Five runs were made per product per platform with the highest and lowest results of each cooler thrown out and the remaining three averaged and graphed below.  SiSoft Sandra 2005 Pro's Burn In program was used to generate our 100% load.  Ambient room temperature was 24.5 degrees Celsius and did not deviate more than .5 degrees C throughout all tests.  Generic thermal paste was used uniformly in all testing as well.  With all that said, let's see what we shall see.

Test Bed #1: (P4 478 pin)

• Intel P4 2.4GHz Northwood @ 3.2GHz

• ASUS P4C800E Deluxe mainboard

• HIS Radeon X850XT IceQ II AGP

• (2) 512 MB DIMM of Corsair XMS4400 Memory

• Maxtor DiamondMax 80gb SATA HDD

• Generic DVD-RW drive

• Thermaltake Tai Chi Case

• Windows XP Pro SP2