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Swiftech H20-120-FB Water Cooling Kit Review

Cooling/Water Cooling by Gamer @ 2005-02-18

Swiftech updates their popular H20-8600 water cooling kit, a new compact and silent pump and a large radiator and accompanying 120mm fan can make the H20-120 a true performer. Read on to find out how hard it can help push an A64 FX-55 and X800XT-PE towards overclock-heaven.

Water vs Air

Test Setup

Gamer's Test Setup
CPU	AMD A64 FX55 (2600Mhz)
Cooling	- Swiftech H20-120FB - Thermalright XP-120
Mainboard	MSI K8N Neo2
Memory	2* 512Mb G.Skill PC4400
Video	Sapphire X800XT-PE
Other	Lian Li PC-71 Antec TrueControl 550W

The Thermalright XP-120 is a high-end heatsink that can house a 120mm fan, it has already build up quite a reputation when it comes down to cooling the latest CPU's from AMD and Intel. (Review)

Since the Swiftech kit also uses a 120mm fan I decided to compare the two head to head using 2 different fans:

Papst 4412 FM: 2400rpm / 82CFM / 38dBA

Delta WFB 1212M (included with H20-120FB kit): 2100rpm/72.4CFM/34dBA

For stressing the CPU, I used a program called S&M which can be found here (click = download).

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This is a real torture test, as the CPU becomes 4-5°C hotter then with Prime95. The load temperature was measured after 15min; ambient temp in all tests is 20°C (68F).

Let's see how things heat up:

How does the XP-120 hold up against water cooling:

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I upped the vcore with .05v at a time to see how this affects the temp. note: In this test, the MCW50™ wasn't mounted on the GPU.

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The temperature rises quickly when adding more juice to the core, a good cooler is needed to prevent the CPU from overheating. Adding vcore helps you to get a more stable overclock and that's what it is all about no?

Water cooling will generally give you about the same idle temps as air cooling, but the advantage can be seen clearly when the CPU is stressed.

Overclocking with H20-120 :

Here's the maximum speed I could obtain:

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Unfortunately I couldn't get the system stable at this speed, but it's always nice to see an A64 Athlon reach 2.9 GHz on a non Phase-changed cooling.

Sisoft Sandra Memory scores at overclocked speed::

2600MHz (cas 2-2-2-5 200MHz)
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2800MHz (cas 2,5-3-3-5 255MHz)
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Upping the MHz gives a nice boost, which can be noticed in most applications. The highest stable overclock with the XP-120 was 2750 MHz, so I gained about 50 MHz here, with a potential for more.

Let's see how cool I can get the X800XT-PE

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