Test results, stock CPUFirst thing I noticed upon the initial system boot was how quiet the cooling system sounded. It's been a while since I last used my own external cooling setup, I did not forget the noise created by the Laing D4 pump and even with the test housing window opened it was not easy to spot the pump its noise. The Xirex water-cooling kit is a very good replacement for low sound air-cooling solutions, though performance wise I found the kit not to score too great.
In idle status and during light pc usage the high-end air cooled setup and the Xirex water-cooling kit scored roughly on par with each other, due to the fast changing whether here in Belgium its a bit hard to keep the room temperature at around the same level, but when you go compare idle versus load temps you can clearly see how the high-end air cooled setup has no problem beating the Xirex kit. Even taking noise into consideration the Xirex kit failed to impress me, it can 'only' score on par with the air cooled heatsink when the fan is at low speed.
Test results, overclocked CPUAt stock settings there isn't really enough heat output to make the one cooling solution score much better then the other one when comparing performance only. With many people using overclocked setups where the heat output is significantly higher you can certainly say that there is a reason why to look at how the cooling solutions perform when our test setup is being clocked well over standard speeds. The higher processor voltage level and the increased clock speed made the Zalman 9700 LED top out as best, it has a +10°C benefit compared to the Xirex kit, the latter again fails to surprise because it could not even perform on par with the Zalman 9700 running in silent modus.
Sound wise no difference, the Xirex liquidcooling kit is a very silent solution and offers you a silent way of computing when the other components are also of low noise. Our main board uses passive cooling on the Northbridge and mosfet and is thus a very good board of choice, though in overclocked modus the entire main board heatsink ran very warm and higher settings are not advised to use. The system didn't even remain stable when I tried to push it up to 3,6GHz, this makes the basic water-cooling kits only useful when you don't push the CPU core voltage not too high, unless you add a fan for extra cooling off course.
Good review all around, however.