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Got a nice little scare last night as tendrils of smoke wafted out of the usb port connector on the back of the aquagate. I unplugged the USB port immediately, and kept an eye on everything to make sure the pumps kept going. I kept the power plugged into the system so I was hoping everything would keep going. I took the cover off the case, and unscrewed the controller board. Everything appeared to be fine, although one of the power transistors had a different discoloration on one side than the other. I’m not sure if it was heat related or not.

My guess is that the ESA controller melted, but I don’t have a good way to check it. I was never able to access the damn thing anyways. For now everything is continuing to work as expected.

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.

I’ve been wracking my brain about how best to deal with the issue on the modem, and decided leave the route just the way it is. What I did do was figure out a very effective way of limiting flow to low-demand devices.

This happens to be a natural gas jet for a range. I had a few sitting around from a conversion. They fit perfectly into 1/4 inch lines and reduce the flow dramatically. Before the change water was flowing at about 6-7 feet per second. Now it’s about 1 foot per second but still plenty for cooling the unit’s large heat sink. The gas jet has an orifice size of 1 mm and the hose is 7mm. The head diameter is exactly 7mm.

I developed a 3D cad model tonight of the part I need, and got some quick estimates. Unfortunately, the costs were absurdly outside my price range. Alternatively, I have found a source for a replacement hunk of copper for the tail end of the water block and it only costs about 5 bucks. We’ll see if it comes through. In the mean time, I have fashioned a temporary cover plate for the water block that allows me to use it to cool the memory and processor of the graphics card.

It is by no means complete, but I wants to test to see how well an alternative would function in case the power module section can not be modified. So far the unit has run under full loads for hours with no leaks. I went ahead and attached it to my card this evening to see how it functioned. I’m getting excellent core temps, although my system water temp has increased to about 27C at idle.

I think tomorrow I will go ahead and make a final diagram of the cooling system, and reroute some of the water flow. The tap lines I installed at the beginning to cool my DSL modem do not run in series with my main cooling loop for the graphics card and cpu. They are small 1/4″ lines so they do not take much away from the main loop, but I’m tempted to redirect more cooling anyways. I would estimate at least a 3rd of the water flow bypasses the radiator, which would never be a good idea. Pinching them off has no effect on system temps however, so maybe I was right to begin with, and it doesn’t really matter. Here’s the idea… The water coming from the CPU and Video card go directly to the radiator. The water going to the modem comes right off the pump, and goes back into the reservoir. The idea behind it is there’s little heat being generated relatively by the modem, so pumping the exhaust water through the radiator is a waste of energy. The bad part of this idea, is that I’m killing off possibly a 3rd of my flow and pressure through my main heat sources and rejection. Testing does not bear this out, but i’m still concerned and curious.

I got the new water block in the mail today.

I eagerly opened it up, and pulled the graphics card out of the machine. I lined up everything, and then my stomach turned as I realized it didn’t fit.

Its close, but that doesn’t count. I spent a couple hours staring at the thing, trying to figure out some way to modify it. The basic problem is that two of the power capacitors are out of position, which I never noticed before, and are too far into the block. Milling the block down isn’t possible. The caps are physically in the same space as the water channel.

So I’m pretty much screwed. I’m not willing to buy a card to fit this block, and there are no blocks that will fit the card I have. Even if I was willing, the card has been discontinued. Its pretty much only available used on EBay at full price.

I’m still tempted to try and find a way to get a new piece milled. We’ll see.

I’ve been very happy so far with my water cooled results. Its much more effective than I ever though it could be with such a simple setup. That being said, there are areas for improving my system.

1) Higher water capacity reservoir and draining capability. The volume of water in the system is sufficient, but I would like a little more thermal mass to absorb energy. Currently, Im getting about 1ºC increase every second in the reservoir as long at my cooling fans are off. I also want to setup an efficient way for me to drain the system for maintenance, preferably into a reserve tank.

2) Vibration Dampening. With the system running so quiet, the vibrations caused by the pump have become rather annoying. I wouldn’t call it loud, but it resonates through my desk. To deal with it for now, I have taken some wide, medium density weather stripping, and lined the bottom of the pump/reservoir. It seems to have stopped the problem for now.

3) Control and monitoring. Since ESA is dead, and this system depends on it for instrumentation, I pretty much don’t have an effective way to use the system. I having to substitute external components to make up for the gaps. So far if got and indoor/outdoor thermometer sitting in the reservoir for temp monitoring. Its not perfect, but it is accurate.

The replacement has been ordered, along with a separate flow/temp sensor since I don’t have a good way to get readings out of my current controller. Hopefully everything will be here later in the week.

The water block is on its way back for a store credit. Fingers are crossed for no problems… would suck if it got messed up/lost in the mail.

I took the 4870 back out of my machine tonight to get a closer look and the board and the discrepancy between it and the 4890. The components on my board are not missing any kind of heat sink material. They are fundamentally different from the four below them. So thats somewhat of a relief.

I also decided that even though having a cool CPU is nice… blowing large amounts of sub-zero air into my office was not. I went ahead and used the box the system came in, and made a nice fitting box for the fan set. I then reversed the top fan again, so the bottom sucks in cool air, then the top fan blows it back out. It raised the temps on the water system by about 10 degrees… but it also did the same for my office lol. I can live with mid 20’s idle, and low 40’s under load.

I’ve been going back and forth with Frozen CPU trying to see if I could get a return exchange on this block… we’ll see what happens. The good news it that they carry a block that looks like a perfect fit! If I can get a credit from them, I should be able to get it next week.

Also, I think I may have found a portion of my cooling issues on this card. If you take a look at these photos:

You can see on the right that two of the power supply transistors are missing their heat sinks. I never really thought about it until I saw a reference image for the 4890. I’ll have to see if I can get that corrected before tonights raids 🙂

FrozenCPU.com is the shit. They are responsive, helpful, and prompt. Always check them out first!!!