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

Performance

With all systems going it was time to move on to performance tests. For these tests the E6750 was clocked to 3,2 GHz for some additional heat output and the radiator fans were connected to the 5-12 V fan controller of the Sniper. Also the Sniper's original 200 and 120 mm fans were adjusted with the same controller, which explains the higher HDD and other temperatures at low fan speed.

Keeping in mind the air cooling results were ran in a well ventilated gaming case and featured one of the best air coolers on the CPU and a decent cooler on the GPU, these results really hilight how badly air cooling gets its ass kicked by a proper water cooling kit. With the CPU temperature dropping full 10 degrees and VGA 15 degress this isn't really a competition.

When the fan speeds on the radiator are lowered to quiet level, the results change quite remarkably. The CPU temperature now drops only by 3 degrees below the temperature achieved by the Xigmatek HDT-S1283, but the GPU temperature still drops by nice 9 degrees. In this test the HDDs got hotter than on air, but this is caused by the fact that also the front fan on the CM Sniper was running at 5 volts.

Noise

The kit comes with two 120 mm fans made by a lesser-known Chinese manufacturer called Ruilian Science (by Hengyang), these fans are specified at 12 V 0,23 A and at full speed they run at 2000 RPM. At full speed the noise indeed is way too high for constant use, and also make the temperature measurements at full speed somewhat irrelevant. At 7 volts the noise is already tolerable and at 5 volts alteast I found the overall noise level low enough for 24/7 use.

In terms of noise I must also say that the test setup hardware isn't really up to date and can easily be quietly cooled also using air cooling. Noise-wise the only good thing in the Swiftech kit is that the fans ran at steady 5 Volts compared to the air cooling fans that ramped up when the parts were stressed. Anyway with more power-hungry modern hardware the pros of water cooling become more obvious.

Conclusion PROS  Great cooling performance Quality parts Easy installation with the Radbox CONS  Installation can be tricky Noisy at full speed Gold Award! Having barely any previous experience from water cooling, getting around with the Ultima Plus proved to be a good crash course into the topic. It's a thoroughbred water cooling set, with all the necessary parts already picked for your convenience. I guess beforehand the installation of a water cooling set can sound like a huge project, but as it turns out, you can also get away with very little work. Anyway even if you could just install the radiator to the back of the case and mount the pump and radiator using double-sided tape, I can't really recommend doing so. For best performance and overall ease of use it's easily worth thinking the layout and doing things properly. Performance-wise the kit was enough to cool our test bed, but if you have a power-hungry quad-core processor, high end graphic card and are going to overclock both then I'd suggest looking for a larger or additional cooler to go along with the supplied 2*120 mm rad. Both fans at full speed really set record temperatures at both CPU and GPU, but also the noise was just intolerable. Overall the Swiftech H2O-220 Apex Ultima Plus might well be THE kit you're looking for if you want to get involved in proper watercooling, but aren't too confident in choosing the parts yourself.

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