Introduction

Today we have the pleasure of sharing with you the experiences we had with a high quality water cooling kit from asetek. The Kit asetek send was the KT03-L20, it consists of all the necessary equipment to cool down your CPU.

Other kits are available that also include water cooling blocks for cooling down the motherboard Northbridge chipset and your videocard's GPU. For a complete list all the different kits available click here.



The KT03-L20 kit contains the following:

WaterChill CPU Cooler block supporting Intel P4 S478, AMD Socket A, AMD S754/S940 (AMD 64)

Black Ice Pro Radiator with push on fittings

120 mm Low Noise Sunon Fan

700 l/hr Hydor Pump with push on fittings

WaterChill Control Unit with SafeStartTM, NoiseControlTM and LED connection

WaterChill Plexiglas Reservoir

WaterChill Tube Set (2,5 mtr.)

ALL fittings and mounting accessories are included

Anti Algae Fluid - 25 ml bottle

Heat Conduction Compound - 2 ml tube

Installation Manual

The material is packaged in a shock resistant box and although it had travelled quite some distance everything was still intact and in mint condition!



The manual included is very clear and explains how to install the whole unit. Included is a bottle with Anti Algae fluid, you just mix this bottle with 1L of distilled water and you'll end up with blue-coloured water, ready to be used!

Every component is of high quality and is build to last, more on that on the next page ->

Water Block

The core of the unit is its good looking CPU water block, made out of copper it promises good heat transfer. The bottom side is pretty smooth and using some high quality thermal compound you can provide very good contact between CPU and the water block.

The default top-cover has holes for both AMD/INTEL setups and for those AMD users who have a motherboard with capacitors close the socket they provide you with an alternative cover.


Click for close-up

The bottom of the CPU water block is protected with a thin film tape to prevent scratches as the material is very soft.





Radiator

The 2nd vital element in this kit is the Radiator. They have chosen to include the Black Ice Pro which is known to deliver great performance while not being a gigantic in size. This Black Beauty has mounting holes both sides leaving you with the freedom of choice on how to install it.



Fan

A Sunon KDE1212PMS3 120mm fan delivers 83CFM at 32-34dba at 12v and with the possibility to run it at 7v is becomes inaudible.

Pump/Reservoir and Control Unit

The driving force behind it all is the Control Units which powers the FAN and tells the pump when to start working.



The pump pushes out 700L/H and has enough power to make the water run at a reasonable speed through the tubes, the Pump get its water from the reservoir which is closely seated next to it. The reservoir opens without much hassle and makes filling up the system a breeze.





The fitting on every component in the kit are equipped with a push-in system for connecting the tubes. This makes installation very easy and removing them only requires that you push down the blue ring while pulling at the tubes.

The older WaterChill kit didn't have the push on fittings on the radiator but luckily this has been resolved:


The old fittings on the radiator
Picture kindly provided by James, taken from his review of the Asetek Waterchill V1



Now let's put it all together and see how it performs ->

Installation:

To start of I laid all the components on a bed of old newspapers, so that in the event of a leak, it would be easy to track.



Asetek recommends the pump to be attached very closely to the reservoir and they provide a "support" plate for this




The end result is like this



After cutting the tubes at the appropriate lengths you can easily connect all the comment by the easy push-in system.

asetek recommended layout: PUMP -> RADIATOR -> CPU-BLOCK -> RESERVOIR

All ready to go:



Using a short wire (included) you can power up your PSU without the need for it be connected to the motherboard. The power for the pump is derailed from an extension cord which plugs in between your PSU and the power source. As soon as you give power to your PSU the pump is powered up and the system will slowly fill with water while you need to pour approx. 500ML of the mixed fluid into the reservoir.
After 5-10min most of the air has gone out of the system and you can put the top back onto the reservoir.

The CPU block will need some good "moving around" to make it loose all the small air bubbles.



I let it run like during 2-3 hours to check for leaks, during that time I decided to put the Sunon fan at a lower pace. The WaterChill control unit is capable of providing 12v or 7v to the Sunon by replacing a jumper.
But when I changed the jumper to 7v and re-powered on the system the Sunon fan didn't start spinning and needed a small push to get going. Luckily this is not case when you the Asetek WaterChill system installed and the PSU is being powered on by your motherboard. The reason for this is the lower voltage the PSU delivers when not connected to the main board.

When I was 100% sure that I had no leaks I installed the CPU water block onto my Pentium 4 test system.


Installation for the Pentium 4 is straightforward:

remove the default P4 bracket

install the 4 pillars

slide the water block over them

place the 4 springs

and screw them down

Everything necessary to accomplish this is provided plus some stickers for decoration

After following all the instructions from the manual I ended up with a good looking CPU cooling:



Most of the air bubbles were completely out of the system after 24 hours of utilisation. I had to improvise a bit to make it all fit as I haven't installed it in a case yet



Finally we are ready to give you some results, we will be covering a multitude of test data and hope it helps you create an idea of how it performs in different situations.

Pentium 4 Test Setup:

JMke's Test Setup
CPU	Pentium 4 "C" 2400Mhz
Mainboard	Asus P4C800
Cooling	- Asetek WaterChill - Corsair Hydrocool - Thermalright SP-94
Memory	1 * 512Mb PC3700 Corsair
Video	nVidia Geforce 1 DDR

Default Test

In the first test the P4 was left at default speeds and the core voltage was 1.55v. Do note that the noise-level of the Corsair Hydrocool surpasses that of the Sunon fan at 12v. The SP-94 Thermalright heatsink was equipped with an 80mm delta for the High speed fan test, and with a Papst 90mm fan that is a tad bit louder then the Sunon at 7v.

During this test the room temperature was kept at a healthy 21.5°C, note that this was tested OUTSIDE a case, this can account for the lower then normal temps, but since all products were tested this way it still gives you a clear image of how each solution performs.




Overclocked Test

The Hydrocool didn't quite make the cut as Prime95 showed errors after running a mere 3min. The CPU speed was at 3.2 GHz and this proved to be Prime stable for hours with the SP-94 and the WaterChill. Here are the results:



These temperatures prove that both solutions have enough muscle to cool down the latest Pentium 4 without problem. The WaterChill takes the edge when it comes down to silent cooling-power. At the high noise levels the SP-94 reigns supreme, but the price you pay is high, the Sunon at 12v doesn't even come near to whining sounds the delta produces.

Fan Test

Xtwerkz was so kind to provide me with some of the latest 120mm fans from Coolink. Together with a high noise YS-Tech and medium performing Enermax I decided to see what difference they could make.



At 12v the Coolink takes the lead, although by only 1°C. So changing the FAN at 12v doesn't make any difference at all. (That YS-Tech pushes over 120CFM while the Sunon has only ~83CFM.. still it doesn't matter one bit temperature wise)



Mirror mirror on the wall who's the most silent of them all? The absence of the YS-Tech can easily explained by the fact that it had a 4-pin Molex connector and could not be put on 7v easily without cutting into some wires. But the remaining contestants showed that at low noise levels there is a greater difference. The Coolink now occupies the last spot and the Enermax jumps to the 1st place. The Sunon is a solid contender and remains only 1°C from the top. When it comes down to noise level, reverse the places and you have yourself an answer! From “pretty silent” to “silent”: Enermax - Sunon - Coolink.

AMD Athlon XP Setup:

terangreal's test setup
CPU	AMD Athlon XP1700+
Mainboard	Abit NF7-S rev2.0
Cooling	- Asetek WaterChill - Thermalright SLK900U
Memory	2 * 512Mb PC3200 TwinMOS
Video	ATI R9000 AIW
Hard drives	Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 9 80GB P-ATA 2Mb Western Digital WD1200JBN 120GB P-ATA 8Mb
Optical drives	NEC ND-1300A DVD burner Lite-On 12x/48x DVD reader

We had to change the top of the water block to make it fit the Abit NF7-S.




Results

During testing the room temperature was 20°C, the SLK900U was equipped with the same 90mm Papst fan we used on our SP-94 setup.



Pretty good results with the Sunon at 12v, and even at 7v it manages to outpace the SLK900U. The system was rock stable at this speed, and when we took the FAN out of the equation we ended up with a maximum temperature of 56°C after ~20min, after which the system spontaneously rebooted.

The Pentium 4 setup held out a bit longer.. after running for 2 hours the temperature reached 55°C and the P4 speed throttling kicked in and kept the temperature constant. If your system fan fails you won't have to fear for instant overheating with this water cooling setup!

Onto the conclusion ->

Conclusion:

asetek has delivered a high quality water cooling solution for chilling your hardware. It keeps your CPU at healthy temperature levels and allows you to push its performance past the default. The included Fan is guaranteed to keep the whole unit running silently while still providing the needed airflow.

PRO
Easy installation
Very descriptive manual
Good performance
Silent system
Competitively priced (spotted around ~€200 in Belgium)
Secure mounting system for INTEL & AMD


CON
requires a bit more effort to install then solutions from Corsair/Koolance


I would like to thank Morten from asetek for providing us with the review material, for a list of Resellers of WaterChill products click the picture below:




Comments and/or questions : Click here