Alphacool Watercooling Starter Kit

System and Testing

We compared the kit to an Intel retail heatsink, a Zalman Reserator 1 and the new supposedly silent Zalman CNPS9500AT, comparing heat and sound levels. Zalman were kind enough to also supply us with a ZM460-APS PSU, to ensure that the sound levels we were testing were in fact coming from the CPU and system cooling fans.



As we mentioned previously, the case we chose for testing was the Coolermaster Stacker 830. We kept the front intake and rear exhaust fans running for the duration of all tests as they were barely audible during our previous review. We located the Radiator at the top of the case with air being pulled through the Radiator and exhausting upwards.

The specs are as follows:

• Gigabyte GA 81955 X Royal Motherboard
• Intel Pentium 4 3.4EE LGA775 overclocked to 3.73GHz
• 1GB (2x512MB) Corsair XMS2 5400 RAM
• NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT fitted with standard Heatsink
• 2 x Samsung Spinpoint SATA 120GB HDD
• 2 x Western Digital WD400JB 40GB HDD
• Sony DVD Drive
• Plextor SATA DVD-RW Drive
• Floppy Drive

No additional fans were added to the case, and once built, proper cable management was carried out to not impede airflow.


As you can see the performance of the Alphacool system is faultless, keeping the CPU just above ambient at idle and at an incredible 41C under load. To put things into perspective this is an overclocked and stable chip, with further ceiling for higher speeds (3.73GHz we tested at was the highest we could clock with the Intel retail fan with 100% stability). The CNPS9500 AT performs quite well also, managing to keep noise levels to a minimum and a respectable 44C under load. The Reserator managed well too, showing that there still is a place in the market for external passive cooling, albeit at a price.

The Reserator and Alphacool kit were totally silent, the CNPS9500 AT was barely audible over the hard drives but the Intel retail screamed and wailed when under extreme load. I don't think that once you have tried something quieter than the Intel cooler you will ever turn back, unless you own a pair of our recently reviewed noise cancelling headphones!

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