Date:
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Author:
Marc Adams
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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CoolIT ECO C240 Performance Review

Other companies made the closed loop self contained CPU water cooler famous. CoolIT Systems intends to make it one of the easiest to install and best optimized and efficient liquid cooling systems around. The ECO C240 doubles up on cooling surface area. Does CoolIT hit its mark?

Introduction

Today we are looking at a new unit from CoolIT (pronounced "cool it"), the ECO C240. You may remember the last time we looked at a product from CoolIT way back in 2007. It was a very different beast. It was a power hungry, Frankenstein’s monster kind of unit that used TEC units to cool water down to sub-ambient temps and then used that frosted water to cool your CPU. It was a unique approach to say the least. It was also one that proved expensive and lackluster.

Fast forward to today and what we have is a similar item but without all the fat. CoolIT has ditched the TEC units in favor of a more mainstream water cooling only setup. What it has kept from its previous iterations is the closed loop design which requires zero maintenance and is a snap to install.

Let’s see how well this new monster can perform and if the ECO C240 should be your next choice for CPU cooling.

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System Setup

Today's testing will occur a little bit differently than usual. The test bed still consists of the GIGABYTE X58-Extreme motherboard, six gigabytes of Corsair DDR3 RAM and the Intel Core i7 920. But today we are putting the system inside the NZXT Tempest EVO case. This was done at the behest of CoolIT to demonstrate a real world configuration comparable to what you guys would have.

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Test Methods

CPU

In keeping with the spirit of the [H] we are once again doing hardware testing of all heat sinks. This means milling a very small path into an expensive CPU to place our thermocouple into. This is by far the best way to test coolers and the only way here at the HardOCP.

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Temperatures for the CPU will continue to be measured using our Sperry Digital 4 Point thermometer.

GPU

For this article the GPU will be kept at stock speed to keep any excess heat away from the CPU that could impact the results. In 2D mode the 9500 GT generates very little heat and to further isolate it from the rest of the system we will install it in the secondary PCIE slot.

Thermal Paste

Noctua's NT-H1 thermal paste was selected as the paste of choice for a few key reasons. The thermal paste has been shown to provide excellent thermal conductivity allowing the heat sinks to better do their job. There is no observed curing time. That is, performance does not get any better over time. Any curing time could have introduced variables into the equation causing at best dubious results and at worst unreliable ones. Our channel milled CPU also requires a compound that is more viscous so the mating compound will not seep into the channel and run off.

Temperatures

Ambient temperature will be kept at 25C for the duration of the tests and measured with a MicroTemp EXP non-contact infrared thermometer and cross referenced with the Sperry Digital 4 Point thermometer. Any variance greater then 0.2C will halt the testing until temperatures return within spec for fifteen minutes.

Since we are dealing with water cooling we will allow extra time for each test to give the water in the loop enough time to reach equilibrium.

Idle

Idle temperatures will be recorded after a twenty-five minute period of inactivity. Any fluctuation during the last sixty seconds will reset the timer for an additional five minutes.

Load

Load temperatures will be recorded after a twenty-five minute period of 100% load. To obtain this load we will be using Prime95 v25.3 set to blend mode. In this way we can heat up the CPU as well as the memory controller which is now integrated into the die. Any fluctuation during the last sixty seconds will reset the timer for an additional five minutes.

Sound

Sound levels will be measured with a Reliability Direct AR824 sound meter from a distance of four feet away. With everything turned off and the room completely silent the meter registered a sound level of 38dB(A). This is a very quiet room where a simple pin drop could be heard. All sound measurements are recorded in the very late evening to further reduce any ambient noise.