Asetek WaterChill: CPU, Chipset, and VGA Water Cooling Kit

Company: Asetek
Product: WaterChill CPU/VGA/Chipset Kit
Street Price: $269 USD
Date Reviewed: October 20, 2003
Reviewed By: Joey Chao

Conclusions:

The WaterChill is an excellent water-cooling solution. We are very pleased with how easy it was to setup and install. The engineers did a great job of making the kit very versatile since it is able to support a number of chipsets, CPU's, and video cards. This one kit has the ability to be mounted to many different combinations of systems. The system is so easy to set up even for beginners who have always wanted a water-cooled machine, but thought too much effort and knowledge was required.

Our performance and temperature gains were nice but some machines will benefit more than others. Keep in mind that the whole system is cooled by one radiator and we are cooling 3 chips at once. Asetek has other kits that are designed to cool the CPU and GPU or just the CPU. These will cool a little better than ours because the our water temperatures should be higher because the system cools so many different things.

Overall, we can recommend the WaterChill to enthusiast who want a quieter computer but the benefits of water-cooling. There are a few kits out on the market from other manufacturers that sacrifice the performance for the reduction in noise. The WaterChill on the other hand is very quiet at 7V operation but it still performs very well. At 12V the fan is much louder but the temperatures do get cooler. More than likely the more hardcore enthusiast will want to use the 12V setting and the conservatives will use 7V.

One of the downsides to the WaterChill is the lack of support for Intel chipsets. The zip ties work fine, but they do not apply that much pressure to the chip and if not done properly could possibly damage the chip. We had no problem installing the NB cooler on our 875P but other may find it to be more difficult.

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