3D Mercury's Liquid Cooling Circuit

If done right we can have a dead silent system on our hands, going water-cooled always has been the ideal approach to silently cool your hardware, although with a total of 5 fans inside the case, this can be hard.



Via stylish side grills cool air is sucked into the liquid cooling system top compartment, after passing through the water-cooling components the hot air is exhausted at the back side of the case. Keeping things separate, this eliminates air passing through the lower part of the housing.



The 3D Mercury is equipped with one 120mm x 120mm radiator, performance wise this unit may come close to the popular Black Ice Extreme radiators. Two adjustable 120mm fans are used to feed the radiator with cool air via a push-pull configuration, their fan speed can be altered between 1000rpm and 2600rpm via the front panel.



The pump is located more to the front, with a flow rate of 400l/h it is by far not the best performing pump we've seen last few years, the deal is that it remained very silent during operation and this will certainly be appreciated by the end user. Although with an adjustable pump it would even have been better.

Next to the pump we found a plastic tank which contains approximately 500 ml water. The tank is equipped with a low water level protection and an over temperature protection. On the front side of the case one can check the water level via a small see-through glass, the addition of blue led backlight gives you the possibility to check water level in low-light environments.



The fill port is located at the top of the case, removing the lid went very easy and there is no need for a funnel to fill up the cooling system. Inside the case Gigabyte has added 2 four-way splitter valves, this way the user can easily add more water-cooling components without having to open the water loop. Expanding the liquid cooling system takes less time from now on, and you can use the splitter valve to drain the system whenever maintenance is required.



The CPU water block is made out of a copper base with acrylic top; the internal design is visible here, equipped with lots of small rounded pillars, a bit like with the D-Tek Fuzion, though the wider channels results in less surface area and this will make this block perform a bit worse theoretical compared to the Fuzion. The mounting kit can be snapped in place, four screws are used to secure the water block onto the motherboard.