Installing the set

In a previous timeframe of my life I've been playing around a lot with water-cooling pc components, price-performance wise I always went for a mixture of cheap replacements for radiators and pumps, while the water block was high-end gear. This is my first time experience with a complete pre-designed water-cooling kit and I was quite curious on how much easier life would be once you have everything out-of-the-box.

Unfortunately things didn't start that well. The top mounting plate of the CPU block is kind of large in size and I was in no way able to mount the block on my Asus P5E main board. In the picture underneath you can easily spot how the acrylic plate does not fit in between the large North Bridge and MosFet heatsinks:



No problem since we reviewers mostly have more stuff around to play around with. I went back to my last months testing setup which features a MSI P7N SLI Platinum main board, this time I got successful. Well, at least half successful, there was literally no space left in between the CPU cooling block and the Nort Bridge heatsink, mounting the block the other way around did not work out either. With light pressure applied I could force the block to fit properly on top of the CPU, four M4 screws make sure that the block stays perfectly in place.



But then yet another issue came along... The screws are not of great building quality and I was not able to use them, I had to shop around for M4 screws myself. Look at how damaged one of the mounting screws is when it came out of the box:



But, I did succeed and few days later this is how my system looked like, ready for testing:



Aside of the above mentioned problems I did found the kit not that easy to install. The tubes are of lower quality and are rather hard to bend, if you make them take corners to short they will not bend but 'knick' instead. Filling and bleeding is not that easy either since you have to insert water inside the loop via a syringe, it takes some patience. Low-end really means low-end with the Liquidcooling Starter kit, in this way Air Cooled heatsink are a lot easier in use. But will they perform likewise; let's move on to our performance comparison ->