Swiftech H20-220 APEX Ultra

Written by Michael Larabel in Peripherals on 9 December 2005 at 01:00 PM EST. Page 4 of 6. Add A Comment.

Performance:

With Swiftech providing some excellent documentation with their kit that provides all the know how for installing the water cooling kit in nearly any setup, and installation procedures for all of the supported sockets, we refrained from sharing all of our installation steps but instead have posted various pictures from the installation process below. After laying out the various components in their designated locations and fitting the barbs on each of the locations with O-rings, we fitted all of the tubing followed by cutting and installing the parts. Everything was an easy fit except the included tubing may need to be heated with a blow dryer or boiling water to properly interface with the MCP655 pump. We had filled the system with the Swiftech HydrX additive and Absopure steam distilled water. Rather than using the Arctic Silver Ceramique, we went with applying Arctic Silver 5. No installation issues with the Swiftech Apogee waterblock were faced when mounting it upon an LGA-775 CPU socket. The configuration we used with the kit was the pump > CPU waterblock > radiator > reservoir > pump in order to maximize the water flow over the Apogee block. Leak testing had occurred for 18 hours and there were no problems with any of the connections.


As with all of our water testing, we went with using our real world methodology. Rather than using a traditional ATX enclosure, we went with running the Swiftech H20-220 APEX Ultra on one of our open-air systems that was running on a HighSpeedPC HSPC Tech Station v2.0. The installation was incredibly simple in our open environment and we were able to mount the radiator horizontally through use of the RadBox on the existing 120mm fan mounts while the reservoir sat on the top shelf and the pump simply was positioned nearby. For our testing today, we focused upon our usual idle and load testing with CPU Burn-In v1.00. Both tests ran in 30 minutes increments. For some air versus water comparison testing for this article, we ran some comparison tests against a Thermaltake Silent775 CPU HSF that was previously mounted on the P5LD2 Deluxe motherboard. This comparison occurred while the CPU ran at its stock speeds of 3.0GHz (200 x 15) and at 3.6GHz (240 x 15). Due to the thermal abilities of the water cooling setup, we were also able to run the system at a maximum of 4.185GHz (279 x 15) while the CPU voltage supplied was upped to 1.5875V and the memory ran at DDR2-930 speeds with 2.3V at 5-5-5-15 timings. Although the water-cooling allowed the system to be pushed further, we were unable to successfully boot the system while the FSB was any higher than 280MHz, which we expect is due to motherboard/CPU related issues. In addition to monitoring the CPU temperature with its on-die sensor, we also measured the water temperature inside of the Swiftech H20-220 APEX Ultra. To accurately monitor the water temperature, we placed a thermal probe inside of the Swiftech reservoir that was attached to a calibrated WinMax WIN8696 digital multimeter. Keep in mind, after the liquid in the radiator is discharged it returns to the pump and is immediately sent off to the CPU waterblock. During the complete testing phase, the ambient temperature was maintained as well as all other constants including the two Delta fans attached to the radiator were supplied 12V during the entire testing process as well as maximizing the water pump speed.




Below are the system specifications.

Hardware Components
Processor: Intel Pentium 4 530
Motherboard: ASUS P5LD2 Deluxe (i945P)
Memory: 2 x 512MB Corsair XMS2-5400UL
Graphics Card: ATI RADEON X300 128MB
Hard Drives: Seagate 200GB SATA
Optical Drives: Toshiba 52x CD-ROM
Power Supply: Ultra X-Connect 500W
Software Components
Operating System: OpenSuSE 10.0 OSS
Linux Kernel: 2.6.13-15-smp


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