VapoChill PE by Asetek

Company: Asetek
Product: VapoChill PE (Intel Model)
Street Price: ~$550 USD
Date Reviewed: February 6, 2003
Reviewed By: Jason R.
Rating: (9.5/10)

Taking a look at the VapoChill (cont):

This PCB which is mounted near the front of the case is the heart & soul of the system. On the front is has the LED readout, and there are a lot of things that connect to this board. First is the 20-pin ATX & 12v pass-thru. The reason for this is because the compressor is powered from the PSU, also when you first push the power button, your system doesn't come on immediately. Instead the compressor comes on, and when it reaches a pre-set temperature then the system will kick on. Also all your MB headers go through this board, as well as the two connectors for the heaters.

The picture on the right is the evaporator that mounts to the CPU. It is heavily insulated, to prevent condensation. Note that the contact area isn't the entire size of a P4 heat spreader, but I don't think that really is an important factor. The actual core of a P4 would fit in that area, so if you center the evaporator properly then all should be well.

Along with the case you get a ton of hardware, which can be overwhelming at first, however if you sit down and read the manual completely, and then take it step by step, it becomes a cinch. The manual is pretty thick, but it includes complete instructions for both Intel & AMD. You get the chill-control software and serial cable, lots of neoprene, heating elements, pass-thru cables, non-conductive grease, screws, back-plate, etc.

All the neoprene and heating elements have adhesive backings, so once you mount this on a board, it doesn't come off easily, and you certainly don't want to re-use it. You can buy extra kits for about $20 or less. (which is what the bag on the right is in the picture below).

The first step is to take off the P4 bracket on your motherboard. You will need to remove the push-pins from the bracket because there are some screws that you use to hold the bracket down on the board. There is non-conductive grease included in the kit that you should put in the CPU socket (as well as a small piece of neoprene that fit in the CPU socket), and you smear it all in the pin holes, and the gap around the CPU and neoprene. The reason for this is to prevent condensation & corrosion.

The next step is to put one of the heating elements on the back of the board, on top of the heating element goes another piece of neoprene. On the top of the CPU goes another piece of neoprene and another heating element. These heating elements help prevent condensation, and I'm pretty sure that Asetek is the only company that uses these heating elements to aid in condensation prevention!

There are some metal bars that goes through the holes on the P4 bracket, to which the evaporator screws down to. This was one of the harder parts of assembly. They say that you need to get the evaporator centered on the CPU core, however the whole this is so big that you aren't really sure if you are centered or not. It took me a few time just lifting it up and down to see where it was making contact to get it hopefully centered. As you can see in the pictures below we tried it out on two different boards. The pic on the left is an ABIT IT7-MAX, and the pic on the right is an MSI 845PE-MAX2, which is what all the benchmarking was done on.

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