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Swiftech Apogee XT High End CPU Water Block Review

Swiftech is not a company to rest on its laurels. After they successfully launched their Apogee series of CPU water blocks they were at the top of the performance charts for many months. But as time went by, competitors improved over the Apogee GTZ´s performance. Today Swiftech is back with a vengeance, the Apogee XT takes on 14 other CPU water blocks in this review. Can it beat the best? Time to find out

Author	leeghoofd
Editor	jmke
Date	2009-12-30
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Conclusive Thoughts

With the Apogee XT, Swiftech has regained precious ground on the top European block, the Heatkiller 3.0. It even manages to beat it on my test configuration! My review sample was in perfect shape. Why do I mention this? Because there are plenty of post on several forums, about blocks being badly shipped, some with missing pieces and some sadly with very badly machined blocks. Another big issue is the impossibility of some users to use their beloved fittings.

At the moment the discussion is still open if the culprit is the thread of the block or if it's the fitting's thread that is not up to standards. Swiftech's CEO Gabe Rouchon is replying directly to the user(s) involved, this to find a quick solution. He explained several times that there seem to have been some startup problems with the fabrication. Hopefully with this close follow up on any quality matter, these issues can be avoided in the future.

Aside of all of that: We got a new king to cool down your favorite CPU, even though the win isn't by a big margin on my simple loop setup. The improvement however over the previous flagship, the GTZ, is incredible. Sadly I never had the opportunity to test the GTZ SE block, which was also a nice step forward and rectified some of the flaws of the original GTZ block. Swiftech's redesign has really paid off! They claim the performance crown, who will it be to dethrone them? The new EK Supreme HF ?

How does this new blood, influence our bang for the buck chart?

Madshrimps (c)

The chart has changed a bit from our previous rounds, as this one is far easier to interpret. The blocks are listed from best till worst performer by taking the average temps between the two pump settings (blue bar). The red bar indicates the retail price we found on some watercooling sites like Aquatuning and Highflow. Looking at the chart and particularly focusing on the two top performers, we see that the Heatkiller still got the edge price/performance. But keep in mind that if you want to use the latter with a back plate, the price will be on the same level. The Watercool LC version remains the best bang for the buck, giving pretty good temps at an incredible low price.

Swiftech Apogee XT Recommended For:
Madshrimps (c)

Pros
+ Top performer, a new reference has been set
+ Probably one of the best designed retention modules
+ Back plate included
+ Additional brackets can be ordered free of charge

Contras
- Why no 3/8 barbs ?
- Missing Allen key

I wish to thank sir Gabe from Swiftech for giving me the opportunity to test this block and Milan from Asus for the Rampage Gene II sample.

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More reviews in this category can be found below:

Swiftech Apogee XT High End CPU Water Block Review
Larkooler Universal High Performance Complete CPU / VGA / Chipset / Mosfet Liquid Cooling Kit Review
Intel Core i7 CPU Water Block Roundup October 2009
Corsair Hydro Series H50 CPU Water-Cooling Kit Review
Intel Core i7 CPU Water Block Roundup May 2009
Mushkin Does Liquid Cooling! eXtreme Performance Liquid Tested
Swiftech H20-220 Apex Ultima Water-Cooling Kit Review
Xirex Liquid Cooling Starter Set Review
Xirex 4mm Thick Water Block Tested for Geforce 8800 GT
EK Supreme and Koolance CPU-340 Compared to The Competition

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