Page 1 - A Cool Introduction

Product: Waterchill Antartica Watercooling CPU/VGA (KT18A-L20)Manufacturer: asetek
MSRP: 242.00
Information: www.asetek.com

Well, I just saw the movie The Day After Tomorrow and figured we should do a watercooling product review! ;) Joking, joking. Today my friends we will look at a product from the very reputable and highly respected Asetek. You know them from their Vapochill products. I have to admit, I'm a very liberal person, yet with some things I'm just very careful and conservative. I know, I know... that doesn't add up, but hey that's just me. With that knowledge in the background, I always have been very skeptical with (high end) technology versus water. It's like 1+1=4, eating ice in a sauna, wearing a raincoat in the summer sun... well you get the point.

So a few weeks ago one of my staff members asked me why we do not review water-cooled products and I said... well exactly what you just read. To get me over that weird idea of water in a PC I figured, what the hell... if you fall off a bike you need to get back on it right? With that approach I've been in dialog with Asetek. Asetek, ladies and gentlemen, is as stated a very reputable company in cooling products. Luckily for me they recently released their WaterChill Antarctica CPU+VGA kit. Yes, you can now watercool both your CPU and your graphics card, which is fantastic news. Watercooling, my friends, is not just for overclocking geeks anymore. The past year or two PC's and their components have faced two growing problems... heat and thus the need better cooling solutions, but most of all this has meant cooling solutions have gotten louder. This last part is what watercooling can solve.

But let us not rule out the tweakers. One of the most common and fundamental methods of increasing system performance lies in the CPU performance. Since the speed at which processes can be carried out depends on the clock cycle of the CPU, by overclocking (increasing the frequency) considerable speed can be gained. Recently overclocking has become more popular mainly because of the value line-up of AMD and Intel products that can be overclocked quite easily and have quite a bit of potential. However, since the users are stepping over the manufacturer's recommended settings, excessive heat is one the major obstacles to overcome. If this little fact is not respected, the extra generated heat can cause major system instabilities, shorter processor life and, in some extreme cases, completely burn out the processor.

So always bare in mind before deciding to overclock, experienced and hardcore overclockers think first about cooling solutions. Proper cooling is indispensable even if the processor is not overclocked because this ensures a longer life for such a precious investment.

That being said, let's go towards page two of this review.

Asetek Waterchill Antartica