Installation

Installing this kit in a medium tower shouldn't pose much of a problem as the 240 radiator is on the outside. The Micro reservoir, as its name suggests, is amazingly small and does its job nicely. The tubing cleared and most of the air bubbles were gone after about 25-30 minutes. Just some bubbles were still noticed in the reservoir. Once the bleeding was over and done with, the water level in the reservoir didn't drop during the next days of testing.



For determining the length of the tubing, take your time and measure everything twice, as cutting them too short can not be undone. A useful tip straight from the manual: soften the tubes in warm water; this will facilitate the installation over the pump in and outlet. The barbs on the radiator and reservoir are plastic and again the hosing needs some softening to facilitate installation. On the CPU block with the alloy barbs this is not really required. It would be nice to have these alloy barbs all over the kit which would make it easier to detach a hose (if ever needed)

I always setup my loops in the following manner: Pump -> Radiator -> CPU Block -> Reservoir -> Pump. But the order of the components in the loop, with a single water block, doesn’t matter much for the overall water temperature or performance; but I do prefer to put the components in the order mentioned above.

Here's my setup in a Lian Li case :



Picture was taken during the leakage test. As you can see the tubing is still full of air bubbles.
I didn't need to use the smart coils as I had an abundance of space available.

Performance Results

The Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 was tested at three different overclocked speeds, 3.5Ghz, 4Ghz and 4.5Ghz;



The Intel QX9650 was tested at 3.6Ghz and 4GHz



Last, but not least, the Intel I7 920 at 3.6Ghz, 3.8Ghz and 4Ghz



Performance analysis and conclusive thoughts next ->