Evaluation & Performance

General rule of thumb with water-cooling is the fact it basically boils down to ambient room temperatures. Our office is generally 78 degrees Fahrenheit year round so we see the same climate almost 24/7. So taking that into consideration that will be our base temperatures to start with. Since we have been using Everest for the last year and the fact we like the wealth of information we are going to use this API to grab all our system temperatures. Let's see how well the Innovatek stacks up this system when it was completely air-cooled.

Innovatek Water Cooled System

Standard Air Cooled System

Right off the bat we can see significant gains in cooling and lower temperatures across the board. The Innovatek system is giving use about 9°C ~ 11°C lower temperatures in most areas. The CPU was teetering between 31°C ~ 32°C, giving us about 10°C lower temperatures over the air cooled system which is right up with the best cooling systems available. The performance is superb while being very silent. Thanks to the quiet cool operations we can now enjoy the lower sound levels in the office.

Another Exciting aspect is the fact we see roughly a 10°C lower temperatures while playing our favorite game titles as well. The GPU's never broke 63°C under Battlefield 2 Special Forces and for any game title for that matter. While certain rendering calls will produce more GPU load, between the half dozen games we tested the SLI GPU's always ran on average 10°C lower temperatures!

The memory temperatures were not affected because they are not watercooled, but I did notice slightly cooler running ram. The ambient case temperatures dropped some 6°C ~ 7°C proving that cooler running hardware will reduce over all case temps as well. I think the products we have been evaluating are first class engineering works of art and the quality and pride in the engineering reflects that fact. This Innovatek gear is awesome!

Bottom Line - Whatever your current temperatures are under the factory air cooled solution, you can expect about 9°C ~ 10°C reduction in temperatures throughout the range of thermal loads with these products.

*Note* results are not meant to be scientific, as with most utilities and evironmental situations, results will vary pending several variables including case, configuration, ambient temperatures and other variables under ideal conditions.