Date: August 15th, 2005
Article by: Joe Anderson (Hardware Reviewer)
Edited by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner / Head Editor)
Product was submitted by: Thermaltake
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PRODUCT SPECIFICATIONS & COMPOSITION (cont'd)
The radiator and fan come assembled in one unit. The 120mm fan has a stylish grill and sleeved wires.
Copper tubes and aluminum fins should provide adequate cooling. Given the relatively low flow rate of the pump, the coolant will spend a fair amount of time in the radiator dissipating the heat accumulated at the block. Thermaltake gives the consumer several mounting options to ease installation.
The BigWater kit includes 500 ml of coolant and a total of ten feet of .25-inch ID tubing. Tubing material is not specified. Both coolant and tubing are UV sensitive.
Maximum-effort waterheads may scoff at the small diameter tubing included with the BigWater, but let’s hold off on our judgment until we can do some testing.
BigWater kits ship with bracketing and hardware for AMD K7 and K8, as well as Intel socket 478 and LGA775 applications. Thermaltake has included all hardware and accessories necessary for installation in their own, and most other chassis’. Inside a cardboard box you’ll find the following:
1) K7 retention clip
2) Expansion slot radiator fan speed controller
3) Expansion slot pass-through for tubing and wires
4) Mylar and foam H-brackets for K8, P4 and LGA775
5) Steel H-brackets
6) Thermal interface material (thermal grease)
7) Two zip bags of mounting hardware
8) Two adhesive-backed Velcro strips for custom mounting the pump
9) Manual
This is as good as any other time to discuss the manual included with the BigWater. In a word, it’s horrible. The print is tiny, the verbiage ranges from merely unclear to nonsensical, the grayscale pictures are so small as to be useless and a ridiculous flow chart/page number system keeps the reader bouncing back and forth in the manual like the ball in a world-class table tennis match. A downloadable PDF manual has better pictures, but is not much better. This could be a real annoyance to the novice. Fortunately the BigWater is fairly simple to install. Thermaltake really dropped the ball here. Consequently, the install portion of the review will be a bit more exhaustive than normal in the hope that it will help some poor would-be waterhead get this unit up and running. ‘Nuff said.
We’ll be installing the BigWater in my Kandalf chassis.
Here’s the victim.
At present, a Thermalright XP-90 pulls cooling duty in conjunction with a 92mm Thermaltake Smart Fan. This is still one of the best CPU air coolers out there and I’ll be interested to see how it stacks up against the BigWater. Let’s take the plunge!
