Installation

A Chyang Fun P4 CF-S868 was the system used for testing, mainly because of annoying akasa CPU cooler in this cube, with its high pitched sound it drives me crazy!

After setting up the system as described in the manual on their website, which consists of plugging in the tubing (note: small amount of water can leak out of the radiator during installation, which is normal because they test the units before shipping), and installing the PCI bracket and finding a spare molex. I short started the PSU and was ready to make a test run. I left it running for 24H and after verifying for leaks I decided to mount the water block on the CPU socket.

The installation of the water block has a nice advantage since it uses the default Intel retention bracket. However, it wasn’t easy to get the X clip to its’ intended place.



The spring sits at the center of the water block where there is a whole and provides pressure on the CPU



It takes quite some force to make it all fit, but once it does the water block is very securely fastened!


Test setup

Chyang Fun P4 CF-S868

CPU: Intel P4 2.4Ghz

Memory: 512Mb PC3200 No-name

Video: ATI Radeon 9800 Pro

HDD: 80GB Maxtor

Room temp at the time of testing was 24°C

So how did the XICE EC900 perform? Running CPUburn for an extended period of time gave me the following numbers:

IDLE
AIR: 30°C
WC: 30°C

Not bad at all, the XICE keeps the system running at the same temperature without any fan running in the neighborhood

LOAD
AIR: 45°C
WC: 43°C !

Now here’s a nice surprise, even when fully loaded the passive water cooling setup achieves lower temperatures then the noisy HSF! The real challenge of course would be to swap the Akasa with a high end air cooling solution (Thermalright SP-94 comes to mind) and slap on a silent fan. The guys over at Materiel.be did so and their results are quite interesting to say the least. The SP-94 with a 1700rpm 92mm fan is on par with the XICE in performance, and at that fan-speed noise will be minimal.

Onto our conclusion ->