CoolerMaster AquaGate Watercooling System - Page 2
Posted by Chris on 10 October 2004 (51554 views) Rating: 3.19
Waterblock:
The waterblock is made from copper and acrylic. It has been machined in a way to allow a greater water contact area and to create turbulence in the water flow allowing better cooling performance. The barbs are 3/8” diameter and made out of brass. The acrylic is quite thick and is shaped to allow it to suit the differences in retention methods for each socket type. The base of the water block is machined very smooth and covered in a clear adhesive to protect it before use.
The Cooling Unit:
The LCU is the integral part of the AquaGate system. It contains the pump, reservoir, radiator and the cooling fan. This is where another feature of the AquaGate stands out. The cooling unit can be mounted externally to your PC case, it can slide into 2 of your 5.25” drive bays or you can mount it in a standard PSU slot with the installation of a mounting bracket.
As you can see from the image above the size of the Aquagate requires 2 x 5 1/4" drive bays to install.
The LCD and control unit can be found on the left hand side with the round bezel. This with the UP and DOWN arrows are used to control the internal alarm of the LCU in reporting on temperature. Behind the silver grille is a fan.
Mounting the cooling unit internally would be great for keeping cables and tubing neat and tidy within your case. However this is sometimes unpractical because of limited drive bays.
Installation:
Once all the items are out of the box your ready to go, we attempted installation on a Intel Pentium 4 3.0Ghz, 1GB Ram and 250GB SATA Drive. The original CPU Cooler used in the machine was a Coolermaster Socket 478 Cooler.
The first step was fitting the brass screws to the plastic water tubing, this is done by placing them over the tubing and then tightening them. The ends of the water tubing then must be placed onto the water block and tightened. Ensure they are very tight because the last thing you want is water leaking onto your CPU!
The motherboard then must be removed from your PC, it is easier to install this on a new machine I must say rather then removing the whole motherboard for installation. However the reasoning for this is that the retention module surrounding the CPU must be replaced with the supplied Coolermaster one to ensure the water block will fit perfectly and without any problems.
Once your motherboard is removed the back plate of the retention module must be secured into the existing holes, then place your motherboard back into the case.
Next step was removal of the plastic coating on the water block which helps in protecting the water block in shipping, then attach the aqaugate rentention module to it. This replaces the original retention module and is secured to the water block with four supplied screws.
Onto the CPU, Coolermaster has supplied in its kit its own thermal paste, which is then applied consistently over the CPU. Included in the package is a thermal sensor, this is used heavily by the unit in getting temperature levels of your CPU and shutting down your machine in the case the CPU gets too hot. We had a problem initially with after the thermal probe had been applied and the system put together, the machine would shut off by itself after 60 seconds. Our initial view was that something was wrong with the unit but later found out that the thermal probe had been placed incorrectly onto the CPU . We had the thermal probe placed directly into the middle of the CPU however it must not be placed in this fashion as it can cause the CPU dye to crack due to the raised area which the probe creates by not sitting flush in between the CPU and the retention module.
Above you can see the Intel retention module has been removed. This is before the temperature probe had been installed onto the CPU.
We then managed to locate a tech article on the Coolermaster site on the best way to install the temperature probe - This can be viewed here >>Temperature Probe Installation.
The site basically goes through the instructions of installing the thermal probe on an angle not to interfere with the CPU but to provide it with just enough information needed to pick up temperature correctly and enable your machine to stay on!
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