Silent Watercooling - Component guide & Radiator shoot out

👤by Thomas Koflach Comments 📅21-08-11
Conclusion


The benefits of watercooling are clear to see, not only can it silence your system but it can also drastically improve cooling performance. I can't tell you how nice it was to turn my system on without actually knowing it was on - a number of times I had to actually check the power LED to see that it was powering up.

It's not all good news though, as the passive radiator setup failed today's testing, showing it's not just a case of throwing together a load of components. The Phobya radiators and fans really were the stars of testing, showing off what watercooling is truly capable of, and that it can be done in complete silence. This setup has more than one plus point as well - there's a flexibility to its thermal capacity.

With the passive setup what you get is all you have - there's no way to adjust how much heat the kit can expel, which could become a problem. For instance, you design and overclock your system to perform on the limits of its cooling capacity, but what happens when say, it's a hot summer's day and your ambient temperature rises by ~10 degrees? With the active setup, you can sacrifice silence a little by ramping up the fans, adding in room for error, but with passive you're stuck - you can't increase the cooling capacity one teeny tiny bit.

Bearing this in mind, and the fact that the passive kit failed when put under load, I'd have to recommend all of you looking to build a silent rig, forget the passive kit and take a long, hard look at the Phobya radiator range. The flexibility, performance and build quality they offer is beyond anything I've tested before, which is why they've earnt themselves the Vortez.net Gold Award.

Obviously building a passive rig takes a lot of time and money. You're looking at a good 4+ hours for setting it all up and bleeding the loop, along with around £500 for the all components. However, if you treasure silence, or want to push your rig further without it turning into a hair dryer it's the ultimate solution.


Phobya G-Changer Radiator Series

Pros:
+ Excellent Performance even with little airflow
+ Great Build Quality
+ Various mounting options thanks to two inlet/outlet threads

Cons:
- Zilch


I would also like to thank Aquatuning for providing the test kit for today's review.




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