Enter Danger Den. Danger Den water-cooling products are representative of the highest quality craftsmanship, astute thermodynamic design philosophy, and the pinnacle of performance. At one time Danger Den hardware may have seemed unattainable, only meeting the needs of a niche' market. Those Enthusiast’s with in-depth experience, and pockets to match. Over a few short years, Danger Den has forged ahead to bring their hardware to the masses, and the cost of their water-cooling "kits" reflect this.

Several months ago I wrote Danger Den after extensively researching what would be the best water-cooling kit on the market relative to cost. Danger Den was the name repeated most. Not just because of high quality water-blocks, but the accoutrements included in their kits. At the heart of any H20 system is the pump. It has a large impact on performance, must be reliable, compact, and powerful. For inclusion in their kit's Danger Den chose an Italian company, Hydor. Hydor makes a wide line of pumps, and their Seltz Compact L30 is a 320Gph unit, very small, quiet and very powerful. For radiators, Danger Den chose Black Ice, and fans spec'd are Sunon.

Their Maze-4 kits begin as low as $174. This includes their Maze-4 CPU block, Hydor L20, Black Ice Micro, Sunon fan, tubing, reservoir, clamps etc. They also offer a Maze-4 Powerkit, for $199, including the Hydor L30, and Black Ice Extreme. Both kits feature their widely respected Maze-4 CPU blocks for AMD/Intel. Today were looking at Danger Den's recent CPU block, the RBX.


Listed below are the components which will be used throughout this review. Arctic Silver AS5 will be the TIM used throughout:

CPU - 3.0C Malay SL6WK L311A838 (IHS removed)

Motherboard - Asus P4C800E-Deluxe (BIOS 1014)

RAM - Corsair Twin-X4000PRO (1024MB Matched pair)

VGA - Asus V9950 (FX5900 128MB, Det. 53.03)

HDD - Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 (SATA150, 120GB)

Monitor - IBM P260 (21" Trinitron .25)

PSU - TTGI USA TT-550TS (550W quadruple fan)

Case - TTGI USA TT-201T3 (aluminium alloy, 5 x 80mm fan, including top exhaust LED fan)

OS – Windows XP

Cooling - Danger Den RBX and Z-Chipset blocks, Hydor L30 (320 Gph), Black Ice Xtreme, 2x120mm/92CFM Sunon (push/pull), 1/2" tubing.

The RBX block is based upon an amalgamation of several popular designs. The "cascade" concept, brought to us by Cathar, has been a very effective design, and the concept has been the astute H20 Enthusiast's favourite. Below Cathar describes the process in the PCLincs forums, on June 6th, 2003;

The block works by water entering the middle barb into a manifold cavity that distributes the water flow out to the jet tube entrances. The jet tubes accelerate the water to around 4x the entrance velocity. Water travels down each jet tubes and is pushed directly down the middle of a "cup" (one for each tube) drilled into the copper base-plate. The jets impinge on the base-plate, creating a highly efficient stagnation region of thermal transfer. Enter the cup. The cups are very closely spaced together. They are wide enough to allow each jet's primary stagnation region to form. The cups are also jet wide enough that the water flowing off the main impingement jet strikes the cup walls at close to the same velocity as the jet stream itself. This creates a secondary impingement effect right at the base of the cup walls. This effect is occurring right where we want it, and it soaks up the heat that would otherwise attempt to go up the copper walls between the cups...The jet tubes are submersed into each cup slightly. This shields the jet streams from the out-flow of surrounding jets, and helps to guide the water out of the cup without interfering too much with the jet stream coming down....