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Thermaltake Tidewater (Dual) VGA Water Cooling Kit

The Unit

The Thermaltake Tidewater unit itself is of impressive size which is a point that cuts two ways.  More on that in a bit. The Tt Tidewater cooling assembly is a pre-assembled, self contained cooling solution for Dual VGA systems.  I want to emphasize dual because as you can see the unit sports two VGA water blocks.  Even though each block weighs 170gms, that's too much weight to have on an item that's not secured and may be potentially flopping around your case when you move things.  If you have a single VGA card system, go with the Tt Tidewater Single VGA unit.  Below are a top and bottom view of the main cooling assembly.

  

The Tt Tidewater assembly is supported on a motherboard by two plastic ribs that fit into unused PCI slots on your mainboard.  This assembly (not including the water blocks) weights in at a hair over one kilogram.  That's a lot of weight, hence the double PCI slot inserts for mounting.

Opposite the supporting fins is a small switch changing the fan speed from low to high speed.  As you may recall from the initial spec listing, the fan operates at a low of 1700 RPM @ 17 dBA or at its high speed setting of 3000 RPM @ 25 dBA.  The air is pulled in from the fan's turbine design and blown over and out of an array of copper convection fins.  Yes, this is a dual slot item.

  

On the business end of the Tt Tidewater we find a water level gauge, fill cap and your water inlet and outlet hoses.  The unit is rated as being maintenance free for 10,000 hours.  This translates into 13.5 months of continuous operation before you may need to add some distilled water or coolant to top off the fluid level.  You can also see the 'Y' splitters for the water in and outlets.  This allows for the two water blocks.  Hence dual VGA cards.  One last item of note here is the trendy blue mesh covering for the 4-pin Molex connector that the Thermaltake Tidewater gets its power from.

  

The water blocks have what appears to be a nickel coating over their copper block base.  The blocks measure 60 x 40 x 11mm and are small enough that they shouldn't interfere with extras around the GPU on most graphics cards.  I attached the units on a variety of cards (both ATi and NVidia) we have here in the shop and didn't run into any problems.  The lapping job as you can see is a bit lacking but then again so is the lapping job on most every VGA card cooler in the first place.

     


BACK                    NEXT

Pg 1 - Introduction
Pg 2 - The Unit
Pg 3 - Inside and Installation
Pg 4 - Concerns and GPU Performance
Pg 5 - Memory performance and Conclusion
 



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