In order for the ChillControl of the VapoChill to work you need to connect its little brother to a free internal USB port on your motherboard.

The smaller unit is attached to a free spot in the case, preferably the motherboard panel for ease of use, the motherboard itself snaps into place after you installed all the standoffs in the correct places on the panel;



The power switch of the case is connected to the ChillControl, and from the ChillControl a new pair of wires leads to the motherboard's power switch. The heating elements are also connected here, as are additional fans and temperature sensors. To finish the installation of the ChillControl you hook it up to a spare 4-pin connector from your PSU.

A64 installation

After removing the default bracket, which can be quite a chore on some motherboards (MSI K8N Neo) you put an insulation pad and heating element on the back of the motherboard, and screw it in its place through the front of the motherboard using 2 long standoffs, over these standoffs you slide 2 pieces of insulation material, the first one covers the socket's form and might needs to be adjusted using a plain pair of scissors to make it fit near the outer ridges. On top of that comes a second layer of insulation which is the last step of the motherboard preparation.




An additional step which is recommended by asetek but not required is insulation of the CPU socket with thermal paste, I skipped this step as the system was not going to be running for an extended period of time, but to give you an idea how messy things can get, 2 pictures from HotHardware's VapoChill 2002 review




P4 S478 installation

The P4 installation follows the same installation steps, with the exception of placing a small insulation piece in the middle of the socket, and using 4 standoffs instead of 2





Evaporator head installation

When the CPU kit is installed on the motherboard all you need to do is mount the panel back into the case and take the thumbscrews and springs to fasten the clamshell (and thereby also the evaporator head) onto the CPU. Before you do, apply some thermal paste in the center of the CPU’s integrated heat spreader, a small dot is suffice and the pressure on the CPU will spread it out evenly, it also allows you catch any anomalies with false or incorrect contact.

I used Arctic Silver’s Ceramique as it designed for sub-zero usage.

If you place the evaporator on correctly then the Ceramique should be evenly spread over both evap and CPU. Let’s do a test mount.



As you can see in the photos above, the power supply unit is installed right on top of the CPU socket, this leads to imperfect contact between evap and CPU due to the force being applied to the tube. This, unfortunately, is one of the few drawbacks of the VapoChill case; by removing 2 screws of the PSU mounting there is enough clearing for ideal contact, an alternative location for the PSU would prevent these installation issues.

When everything is installed into the case it is a matter of plugging in the pass-through power cable of the VapoChill unit into the back of the PSU. This is one of the other new improvements seen in the XE II, no longer do you need a very beefy PSU to power both your CPU and the VapoChill.

Holding down the power button for a few seconds starts the compressor, during this time the front blue led pulses steadily, when a predefined temperature on the evap head is reached the ChillControl triggers the motherboard power switch and your system will POST.

Go straight into the BIOS and check the system health and if you’ve done the installation correctly you will most likely see a negative CPU temp. Do note that these motherboard reading are far from accurate and some motherboards act up when one of their sensors return subzero values. While both test motherboards displayed acceptable temperature in the BIOS, on my DFI NF3 250Gb in Windows the DFI health monitor came up with a 255°C temp reading for the CPU. The Speedfan application displayed temperatures comparable to those in the BIOS, luckily!



If you connected the USB cable correctly onto the motherboard you will see a new device under “Human Interface” in the advanced properties of your system in Windows. To install the correct drivers you need to download the latest Control Panel from asetek and point windows towards the install folder to link it with the correct driver.

The Control Panel allows you to check the temperature of the Evaporator and speed of the connected fans; you can also change the speed of the fans from 30 to 100%. My first experiment with my A64 3200+ S754 system allowed me to boot into Windows at 3ghz using 1.7v vcore, running idle Speedfan gave a -13°C reading! However the system was not stable enough for any benchmarking or general usage so I had to back the speed down.



So let’s see how far I can push my P4 and A64 systems ->