Vantec Stingray Watercooling Kit Review

Cooling/Water Cooling by easypanic @ 2005-09-29

Vantec surprises us with their first all-in-one water cooling solution. They are entering a rather upcoming popular segment of cooling aspects, as computers get faster and hotter. Can this kit keep our computer fast and cold? Let?s find out ,shall we?

  • prev
  • next

Testing

Testing:

All tests were done with the following setup:

easypanic's setup
CPU San Diego 3700+
Mainboard DFI NF4 SLI-DR
Memory 2*512Mb PC3200 OCZ
VGA ATI x800 PCI-E


I measured the temps with MBM 5 together with the DFI NF4 Data Files, you can find them over here.

Stressing was done with S&M, being one of the "hottest" stress program available. Temps were measured after 10 minutes of continuous stress.

CPU and Chipset tests

Madshrimps (c)


As you can see, water cooling is still a lot better than air-cooling, no surprise here.
Time to give my CPU a push to 2800 MHz:

Madshrimps (c)


Temperatures increase with more voltage and speed added, both cooling solutions see a similar rise in loaded temperature (~12°C).

While a more effective CPU cooling is always favorable to have, it’s the water cooled nF4 chipset which pleased me most, as the stock cooler has a quite annoyingly loud fan on it. Even with water cooling the chipset gets quite hot:

Madshrimps (c)


VGA tests

The VGA tests were done with ATI Tray Tools, it has a "scan for artifacts" option which really stress the GPU. Temperatures were measured with the same program.

Madshrimps (c)


I stopped the test after three (3!) minutes. Seeing the temperatures rise to above 120°C was quite disturbing, especially if you compare them to the results I got with the stock cooler:

Madshrimps (c)


With temperatures this high the most likely problem may be mounting, does the GPU mounting method need an overhaul? Let’s see if I can find the exact problem of my high video card temp woes. ->
  • prev
  • next