Today's Hard|Forum Post
Today's Hard|Forum Post
Date:
Thursday , June 23, 2011
Author:
Marc Adams
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
Share:

Antec KUHLER H2O 920 CPU Water Cooler Review

Antec has been getting more serious about its cooling solutions lately and earlier this year Antec introduced its KUHLER 920 model. If you don't need extreme water cooling, these types of coolers are definitely the way to go in terms of noise and ease of installation.

Introduction

When it comes to water cooling your CPU, the competition as of late has become quite fierce. Antec, Corsair and CoolIT have all brought to market multiple versions of self contained water cooling units designed for quick installation and zero maintenance. Today we are looking at Antec's second product in this field, the KUHLER H₂O 920. With a bigger radiator, double the fans and some extra software control thrown in for good measure Antec is putting up a solid fight for your business. I'll look at the overall performance of the unit including its sound performance, overall value and rate any extra features it has. Here we go.

Article Image

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.

Article Image

Article Image

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.

Article Image Article Image Article Image

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.