Watercooling Radiators Roundup

In the last few years we've witnessed a massive increment in the wattage we ask our water cooling systems to dissipate.

Latest generation video cards accompanied by increasingly powerful processors are starting to cause trouble even to the most sofisticated setups.

If on one hand the evolution in waterblocks design allows great performance levels by continuously improving efficiency, on the other hand the diffusion of liquid cooling goes side by side with a desire to diminish noise, a fact that often affects overall performance.

When it happens, the cause is almost always an incorrect choice of some of the system's components, for example the radiator or the fans to go with it.

In today's test we'll look at some of the radiators found most frequently in Italy, assessing their performance under considerable load, equivalent to that of a tipical high-end computer with a very latest generation SLI configuration.

To avoid blunders in temperature measurements and provide the radiator with a constant load, we decided to use a custom-built heat exchanger fueled by a pair of 200 watts power resistors for a total of 400 actual watts transferred into the water.

Once built, we connected the heat exchanger to a Laing 500 pump running at 12v to ensure high capacity and suitable water flow through the radiators.