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Thermaltake
Tidewater (Dual) VGA Water Cooling Kit Final installation made me sit back and consider a bit after all was said and done. Installation should go fine and pose no problems as long as the end user remembers two VERY important things. The first of these is that your mainboard HAS to be a full sized ATX board. Our SLI test board is an Albatron K8SLI. This board sports only two PCI slots. The Tt Tidewater's width was enough that it not only used two PCI slots but it intruded into the slot just above rendering it useless for anything with any width to it; vis-à-vis a VGA card. As far as our test bed we had to install things with the Tidewater in only one PCI slot laying flat to keep things in place. Now a board with three PCI slots would do fine as this is the norm for most SLI rigs anyway. A compact SLI board like the K8SLI, running SLI like our test rig will not allow normal installation. You have to have a full sized board.
The second thing to note is the length of the card. The card fit perfectly in some of the larger cases here, such as a Tt Tai Chi case, a full sized SilverStone Lascala 10 HTPC case and even a smaller framed Tt Bach HTPC case. But the Tidewater requires a full 11 inches for itself and its hoses to be comfortable. The three cases we just named gave the Tidewater plenty of room but on the flip side, the removable HDD rack of a Lian Li PC-60 (a VERY popular case) kept things from being comfy in that box. Removal of the HDD rack fixed the problem but again, this is definitely something to keep in mind. 11 inches of depth minimum is required as measured from the rear case wall back. Performance To measure performance, we looped some rather intensive Quake 4 timedemos we created here. After 20 minutes, we recorded temperatures at three points. First was the GPU temperature as reported under the Temperature Settings section of the NVidia Display Properties tab. Second was the GPU temperature as recorded by our IR Thermometer on the rear of the PCB of the card, immediately behind the GPU area. Last was the memory. Let's not forget that water cooling is hip BUT without the air blowing off a stock GPU cooler you have zero airflow across the memory's RAM sinks; hence the importance of measuring this. Ambient room temperature was 24.5 degrees Celsius, never varying more than .5 degrees.
Test Bed
AMD Athlon 4000+ (Clawhammer)
Albatron K8SLI
mainboard
(x2)
Albatron GeForce 6600 GT VGA Card
Maxtor DiamondMax 80gb
SATA HDD
Generic
DVD-RW drive
Windows XP Pro
SP2
Senfu Tech
Station open case rack
Results
First, let's look at the GPU temperatures as recorded under the
NVidia Temperature Settings tab. Since there are two GPUs we have averaged the
temperatures between GPU #1 and GPU #2 and graphed that result here. Three results are graphed below:
stock, the Tt Tidewater with fan speed set to 'low' and the Tt Tidewater with fan speed
set to 'high'. Next let's take a more hands on reading with our
IR Thermometer from the back side of the GPU. This is not because I don't
trust the temperature display within the display properties but I like to have a
second point of measurement whenever possible. This helps to validate the
first. Frankly, I didn't expect much difference in
performance between low and high speed fan settings but next to nil was
completely unexpected. In 'low' speed trim the Tidewater was all but
silent - a true pleasure and a noticeable improvement over the stock air
coolers. In 'high' speed trim well... let's just say the Tidewater makes
me seriously question its max sound rating of 25 dBA. It was quite loud. Considering
there was no performance improvement, it really isn't a big deal, just put
it on 'low' and keep it there.
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