Again we see the reservoir has been packaged in an identical box to the other components of the Alphacool NexXxoS Cool Answer 360 DDC/XT.


In this reservoir package we find a Laing DDC - 5,25 Single Bay Station, rubber pad along with nuts and screws to attach the Laing DDC-1T pump.


The reservoir is made from Acrylic with each section glued together to forum the main water holding area. To the rear of the reservoir are two further acrylic plates, one with a separate chamber and the last to allow fitment of the pump.


The front of the reservoir has a steel plate which is coated in black paint. This plate allows the user to judge how much coolant is in the reservoir and is attached via Allen screws. The finish of the pate, as you can see is not brilliant with the etching slightly chipped away. As this will likely be the most prominent visual part of the watercooling kit, we would have liked the finish to have been much better.


An area we did like was that the fill port area had a metal screw-plug. This is much better than some plastic plugs we have seen used in other kits as it is less likely to become chewed by repeated use. The recess of the plug however prevents 100% filling of the reservoir.


Inside the reservoir there are two sections covering both inlet and outlet areas. These are to prevent excess bubbles from re-entering the loop which is a good design.


Alphacool chose a strange method of inlet/outlet areas. Instead of having a direct outlet into the pump, acting as a header tank, the coolant is sucked into the pump and then ejected back into a recess of the reservoir. While this method works fine (once the pumps is primed), it does introduce extra angles which will add restriction to a watercooling loop however because of the pump/reservoir combination, designing it any other way would be troublesome.

It is also worth noting, as you can see from the picture above, there was some 'flash' particles from the Acrylic so the unit would benefit from flushing before use.