Cooler Master Aquagate MAX Review
by danlor on Apr.12, 2010, under Uncategorized
I feel I have put enough time into this system to judge its value and effectiveness. While I am by no means a long time expert in PC water cooling, I do have a lot of experience with Overclocking, plumbing, and automotive cooling systems.
Water cooling is about the sum of its parts, and parts there are a many. For someone jumping into this their first time, there are an over whelming number of components and choices. What type of pump should you get? how big of a radiator? What size tubing? What kind of fittings? Reservoir? Then there are sensors and fan options as well. None of these can be decided on their own, and none have necessarily right answers.
Cooler Master in this instance has decided to help those first time modders by deploying a 600 watt system that includes everything you need to setup a function water cooling system for a great price. At 150 dollars Its a great value, and you know all your fittings are going to go together properly.
The system comes with:
The radiator is a good model, with fairly open design to allow good airflow without too much restriction. It comes with the fans pre-mounted, although they are not properly baffled, and have substantial air leakage around the fan housings. Normally this would not be an issue, but since there is a certain amount of static pressure needed to move the air through the radiator, this does lower cooling effectiveness. I was able to achieve a full 2-degree drop in water temps by simply using weather stripping to give them an airtight seal.
The fittings used through out the system are sub par. They have a very cheap feel, and do not hold the hosing well. I found they cut into the hosing much more than I would like due to their internal sharp edges. When I get 50 bucks to blow I plan to replace all of them with proper fittings.
The hosing that comes with the kit is claimed to be PVC, but I’m not buying it. Because I planned to run my system outside my chassis, I bought extra Feser Active UV Hose at the start. The difference in quality is substantial. The supplied tubing scratched very easily, and is extremely stiff. Any bends regardless of the radius leads to crimping. This requires the use if the anti-kink coil where they shouldn’t. On a side note i feel the coils should never be used outside of the most extreme situations. Inserting the coil into your hosing creates a lot of turbulence and lowers the water flow. The feser tubing on the other hand is really great. Its soft and pliable, and is able to go through fairly tight bends without folding. I still have a large amount of it left over, and plan to replace most of my Cooler Master hosing with it.
The main pump/reservoir assembly is well built. It has a solid aluminum shell with eye pleasing design. It looks good sitting on its own or installed in a chassis. One problem I can see though, is the filler cap is installed in a position thats impossible to reach once install in a case. The reservoir is a little small, but is just large enough to get bubbles out of the flow. The flow indicator is almost useless. Its design traps air, requiring you to turn the case on its side to release them. Make sure to never do this while the system in running!!! Doing so lifts the pump out of the water, draining it and sending large amounts of air into your lines, and stalling the pump.
The cpu water block was much better than I expected. While Im sure the koolance 360 could do an even better job at things, the supplied water block does have good cooling veins, and great flow. Under load I’m getting about a 10C temp differential between the CPU and water. Idle is about 4C. I currently see no reason to swap it out with something better.
Since installing the system, and making my system almost silent, I have noticed the smaller noises my machine makes. They were always covered before by white noise. On top of that, I found my desk humming and resonating to the vibration caused by the pump itself. Curiously, my keyboard was the most effected… with my fingers buzzing all night as I played WoW. I dealt with this originally by lining the bottom of the case with weather stripping, but I found the pump to still be louder than expected. So I next opened the case and unscrewed the pump from the chassis. I found the pump did have rubber isolation feet on it, but they were no effective. I once again went back to my trusty weather stripping, and used two trips to glue the pump in place of the screws. Its made a huge difference.
The hosing inside the assembly is black rubber with clamps. I would have preferred pvc with compression fittings, since the rubber will eventually rot and fail, and the clamps will leak. Cost is undeniably a factor here, and can be forgiven.
As far and the ESA board goes… its a complete waste and a hinderance. Cool Master supplies absolutely no tools to manage the controller which is unforgivable. nVidia has long since abandoned the platform, leaving you with a fancy circuit board that does nothing. I had to route around it since it constantly ran the fans at full speed. I ended up purchasing a sensor readout separately. I went ahead and ran the radiator fans to my cpu fan blocks since I can control the set points effectively through my mother board. the Idle fan speed keeps the water at about 28C while cooling both my CPU and graphics card. Under load, the fans kick in, and drop the temps further.
The cooling fluid is green glycol, just like your cars uses. Nothing fancy, but it does look great in the clear tubing.
Overall I would recommend this system to most people doing a ground up build or conversion requiring either quiet operation, or extreme heat dissipation. Its not perfect, but the price is. Even with my problems and reservations, none of these issues would lead to failure of the project. Its also easily expandable to include other components as I have done.
