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DriverHeaven Review |
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System setup and notes: Setting up the Corsair Cool was an interesting affair, the manual is reasonably well written and if followed to the letter will get you from beginning to end without to much trouble. As we were reasonably experienced in water-cooling setups we found ourselves referring to the manual for clarification on a few points. One issue we did have was that a few of the graphics/diagrams within the manual were a little small and therefore not entirely clear for the first time user to ascertain. For those of you used to Asetek's Waterchill kits the system setup on Cool is quite different however no more complicated. Here are a few shots of the system when it’s installed… As mentioned earlier, the reservoir installs in the Drive bays of your system, and can be slid out to fill.
Here you can see the pump sitting at the base of the system, when primed it is attached to the base of the case by an adhesive strip provided in the kit.
Next up is the CPU block which features an attachment method we prefer to all other water-cooling we’ve used. Instead of having to remove the plastic bracket around our Athlon64 and run screws from underneath, the Corsair Cool attach's to the bracket.
Corsair provides a PCI slot bracket which allows you to run the tubing out of the rear of the system to where the Radiator and fan are positioned. If you have a case with a 120mm fan socket on the rear then you’ll find no problems, if though like me you have an 80mm fan on the rear you have to be a little more inventive.
One final nice design element is the cable clamps corsair provides. Whilst some kits have you push on the tubing to the various components, Corsair provide small plastic clamps to hold the tubes in place, giving you a nice sense of safety. Before we look at the performance of the kit there is one final point of note, uninstallation of the kit is not easy. Because the reservoir needs to leave the kit via the front of your case and the Radiator/fan is outside the rear this can prove to be quite fiddly. We found that the best way to remove was to kit the tubes at the radiator and drain from there. Then insert tissue in the tubes to stop any small drops from escaping, then feed the tubes back through the PCI bracket. Next we uninstalled the internal components and fed everything (Inc CPU block and pump) out through the drive bays on the front of the PC. Test System: Corsair Cool Athlon64 4000+ CPU Windows XP SP2 PC Mark 04 The test system was built from scratch, a format of the hard drive was performed (NTFS) and then Windows XP was installed (SP2). Next the chipset drivers were installed. The only update applied was .net framework 1.1(latest service pack). Following a reboot the Video Card drivers were installed. Next the benchmarking tools were installed and finally the hard drive was de-fragmented. For all tests the Nvidia were set to default quality/optimisations (unless otherwise stated) and all applications were patched to their latest versions.
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