Mounting woes

The results from the VGA tests were very poor and the reason is because of the push pins not being able to provide enough pressure (I’d rather see some bolts and springs) to guarantee a perfect fit on the VGA card. As you can see on thumbnail on your left below, the thermal paste is not smeared out; the thumbnail on the right shows the chipset which does have a good mount.




Conclusion:

Vantec's first water-cooling kit gives me some mixed feelings, the looks are good, the CPU and chipset cooling are more than sufficient and even allow overclocking without temperatures reaching critical highs. The same, however, can not be said of the VGA cooling, which suffers from mounting issues badly, leaving you no other option than removing that water block from the loop.

Cooling your chipset with this water-cooling kit is a big relief. It is very, very quiet and temperatures are really good. Too bad SLI-setup owners cannot use this chipset water block. I had to place my VGA card to the second PCI Express slot.

I spoke to Vantec about the LED's in the reservoir, as I didn't like them very much (a bit too flashy for my taste). They told me they put the LEDs in so you could clearly see if there was a power loss. Good thinking, but perhaps one nice big white/blue LED could do the job too.

This kit certainly has potential, but is perhaps a little bit too light to combine with very high-end computers. Priced in the region of $150-200 I can’t help but think it lacks a bit of punch.

Pro's
+ Ease of installation.
+ Good pump + mounted nicely with the reservoir.
+ Decent finishing on the water blocks.
+ Silent
+ Good CPU and chipset temperatures.

Con's
- Reservoir is a bit too "discotheque"
- Bad VGA mounting leading to bad VGA cooling

Big thanks go out to Vantec, for letting us try out this watercooling kit!


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