Swiftech H2O-220 Apex Ultima Plus Water Cooling to the Max!

Author: Jouni 'Jipa' Vasama Published: 17.02.2009 Manufacturer: Swiftech Product Group: Cooling In English Suomeksi

Bundle continues...

The kit comes with Swiftech's fragship CPU block - the Apogee GTZ. Just like all the other blocks in the kit this is constructed from pure copper base and anodized aluminum top. Swiftech claims that thanks to block's entirely new design and the micro pin matrix on the base this block offers the best performance on the markets today. Mounting hardware is only supplied for socket 775 and 1366 processors, but AMD mounting sets are also availabe.

The MCW50 GPU-block comes with the most installation hardware. There are different bags for Nvidia Gefore, Ati Radeon, a special mounting bracket for GT200 -series cards and some memory heatsinks for the graphic card.

The model of the radiator is MCR220-QP and it comes with two 120 mm fans pre-installed. The bundle for the radiator includes 5 and 7 volt adapters for the fans, mounting screws, hose clamps, rubber grommets for the hoses to be routed through the case (when installed externally) and also a PCI-bracket for fan cable routing. There's also something called radbox installed to one of the fans. This is a mounting hardware that makes it easy to install the radiator to any existing fan hole on the case. We'll go through using this later on in the article.

The easiest way to increase the cooling power of a water cooling system is to either get a larger radiator or have multiple radiators in the loop. The supplied 2*120 mm fan-sized radiator will not be enough to quietly cool latest, power-hungry parts, but Swiftech has had to make a compromise between the ultimate power and ease of installation.

The kit also includes four sets of barbs, three plastic pairs for the GPU and NB-blocks and reservoir and two metal ones for the Apogee GTZ. The plastic barbs are much cheaper than the high-flow metal ones and also proved harder to use because of the thicker walls. I can not help but wonder how much it would have effected the cost of the kit if all the barbs would be metal ones...

The copper bases of all blocks have been polished to mirror finish and the result is pretty much flawless.

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