Swiftech QPower Barebones Case

Company: Swiftech
Supplied By: Xtreme Tek Werkz
Product: FS020-H20 Series Liquid Cooled Entry Level Server Case
Street Price: Starts at $283 USD
Date Reviewed: March 27, 2002
Reviewed By: Jason

Installing The Board:

For an initial test I installed my good 'ol ABIT KT7A-RAID motherboard with a 1.4GHz Athlon (T-Bird) processor. The water block fit just fine, and had plenty of clearance around it left over. The board has been voltage modded to allow a little over 2.2v, I wired in the resistors to the ground on a 3-pin plug which I can plug on and off the motherboard whenever I want to use the higher voltages.

Installing the board and components is just like any other. Installing the water block was very easy following their step-by-step instructions.

One last picture to illustrate how the QPower case is supposed to operate with the fans.

(Courtesy of Swiftech)

What to compare to:

To compare with cooling ability, I used the same motherboard and CPU but tested with an AlphaPAL8045, Thermaltake Volcano 7+, and regular Volcano 7. This pretty much gives a variety of top-of-the-line, middle-of-the-road, and budget HSF units.

Since this is the first time using an Alpha PAL8045 in a review here at Extreme Overclocking, I snapped a few extra pictures to show what it looks like. You can usually get this heatsink with your choice of several 80mm fans, however I chose the 80CFM Delta fan to use since it would give top cooling performance. This combination is about the peak of current air-cooled performance that you can get today.

A big thanks to Heatsink Factory for sending the Alpha unit to use in this review!

In the box comes the heatsink, hardware, and instructions. Note that you will need to have your motherboard removed from its case to install this heatsink because it uses the 4 holes around the socket.

One thing that makes the Alpha heatsink's unique is the hexagonal pins that make up the heatsink. By making them this shape they are increasing the surface area for the heat to dissipate. Very clever and also very cool looking.

Alpha's trademark look seems to be their style of combining an aluminum heatsink with an embedded copper base. This heatsink is essentially an overgrown version of its predecessor, the PAL6035. Also, you will need to clean off the base before initial use, they put a thin coat of oil on it to prevent oxidization while it is boxed up.

Once I got the heatsink mounted with the fan, even with it turned off it looked like a beast! Notice how little clearance there is between the heatsink and the capacitors. I don't think you should run into any problems with boards that follow the standard design specifications, however some boards time to time tend don't follows specs completely and you could end up with a component blocking your heatsink. Also I had to do a little dremel work to the fan to get the screws to sit flush, and could only mount them on two sides (which seemed sufficient).

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