Thermaltake
Tide Water All in One VGA Liquid Cooling Module Review
Page 6 of 6
Review By Clay Angelly - March 21, 2006
TEMPERATURES AND CONCLUSION
To say that I was impressed with how well the Tide
Water cooled would be an understatement. It cooled far beyond what I had
anticipated (as well as what some other sources are reporting). I believe that the
cooling ability of the Tide Water is directly related to making sure the water
block is as tight as possible against your GPU. This is common knowledge,
especially amongst the water cooling community. You have to be very careful as
you don't want to over-tighten...but, if you don't tighten enough, you will not
achieve the full cooling potential.
The ambient room temperatures for all tests was 20°C
(+/- 0.5°C). The ambient case temperatures for all tests was 22°C
(+/- 0.5°C). All tests were run for 30 minutes or longer until the
maximum temperature had leveled off. The Half-Life 2: Lost Coast video stress
test was run repeatedly in windowed mode so that the temperature could be
monitored at the same time. Speedfan was not used as it was unable to detect the
7800 GTX's temperature sensor.
Thermaltake Tide Water - 7800 GTX
Cooling (Single Card)
Ambient Room Temp: 20°C Ambient Case Temp: 22°C
The Tide Water cooled the single 7800 GTX an average of 31.1°C better than the stock cooling solution.
Breaking that out to the low fan setting, we get an average reduction of 29.8°C
and 32.5°C average reduction on the high fan setting.
When two 7800 GTX cards are involved in an SLI setup, the temperatures of the
top card will be lower due to the shared load with the second card. The top card
is always* going to run hotter than the second card. Why did I put an
asterisk (*) after "always" in that previous sentence? I thought I
would just show the two screenshots below. Remember, the Tide Water is cooling
the first card denoted as GeForce 7800 GTX-GPU1 in the NVIDIA Control
Panel.
* Thermaltake Tide Water - SLI Cooling -
First Card: 42°C
Thermaltake Tide Water - SLI Cooling -
Second Card: 67°C
So, the top card of an SLI setup is running 25°C cooler than the second card. Nice! This delta remained consistent throughout the other benchmarks and games
while in SLI mode.
CONCLUSION
No question about it, the Thermaltake Tide Water offers some very impressive
cooling capability. It is a very well-built piece of equipment with a lot of
attention to detail.
The ultimate question always comes down to whether or not
it is right for you. If you want to really cool your video card, aren't too
picky about some minimal fan noise (on low) and substantial fan noise (on high),
then the Tide Water might be a perfect fit. Small form factor case owners will
likely find the Tide Water's size, and especially tubing to not be a good fit
for their case size limitations. Also keep in mind that you'll need two free
(adjacent) PCI slots in order to install the Tide Water.
Thanks as always to the great folks at
CrazyPC.com for providing
us with the review sample.
PROS
Excellent cooling
Low and high fan settings
Great design for large component
Great build quality
Attention to detail
Good photos in printed manual
Decent price at around $80USD
CONS
High fan setting is louder than most power supplies
Fan switch not externally accessible
Terse, incomplete directions in printed manual
Requires two empty (adjacent) PCI slots
Only room to use one of these per case
Memory is not cooled
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