Today's Hard|Forum Post
Today's Hard|Forum Post
Date:
Friday , April 08, 2016
Author:
Marc Adams
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Thermaltake Pacific RL240 Water Cooling Kit Review

In a world now filled with All-In-One CPU coolers, Thermaltake takes it old school with a water cooling kit that has everything you need from A to Z. If cutting your hose to length and perfecting the layout and presentation of your cooling loop appeals to you, Thermaltake makes it easy with a one stop shop.

Introduction

Today we have a special review for you as we look at the Thermaltake Pacific RL240 Water Cooling Kit. The reason why this is special is it's a throw back to the early days of cooling when All-In-One kits didn't exist and only those who considered themselves hardcore would even think of combining water and their computer for maximum performance. My how times have changed. No longer do you need to be hardcore to use water cooling. Improvements in design and materials have allowed for cooling levels unheard of before.

There are still many computing enthusiasts that do not like the one-size-fits-all approach of AIO coolers. There is also the passionate enthusiasts who enjoy the meticulous nature of picking out each component in their water cooling kit, sometimes taking weeks or months planning out their build and piecing it all together. There is a middle ground however being that person that wants to do a custom cooling loop, but doesn't want to spend months specing it out possibly making bad component choices along the way.

Thermaltake is now addressing that corner of the water cooling market. The Pacific RL240 Water Cooling Kit is a full fledged water cooling system in a box that has every single piece you need to get your PC's CPU water cooled. It's gives you everything want like increased cooling performance, flexibility, and expandability, and gets rid of things like mismatched fittings, improper flow rates, the wrong tubing, or a pump that is not right for your system.

Since we don't often look at water cooling kits like the Pacific RL240 or go into depth about building your own system, this review is going to take its time going over the different components and using those.

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System Setup

Today's review takes place on our fourth generation [H]ard platform. The test bed consists of the ASUS Z87-Deluxe motherboard, eight gigabytes of Corsair 1600 MHz DDR3 RAM and the Intel Core i7-4770K.

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Test Methods

CPU

The biggest change you will notice is the removal of hardware testing. In recent years, Intel has shifted its methods of testing to software based and so we find it acceptable to do the same.

GPU

Once again we have an integrated GPU in our processor which alleviates the need for a discrete one. With the removal of a discrete GPU comes the advantage of not having an additional variable to account for.

The iGPU will not create any anomalies in our testing as long as we practice consistent testing methods.

Case

Corsair was kind enough to provide us with its Carbide series chassis. It provides excellent airflow and interior space and is a good reflection on current case design.

Thermal Paste

Noctua's NT-H1 thermal paste was selected as the thermal interface material (TIM) 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 its 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.

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.

Idle

Idle temperatures will be recorded after a twenty 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 minute period for air cooled systems, and thirty minutes for liquid cooled systems, at 100% load. To obtain this load we will be using AIDA64 Extreme Edition v3.00.2500. This places an even greater load on the CPU than before and includes some benefits. Because the load is so extreme we see the temperature vary wildly from 72C to 86C in some instances. To get an accurate reading we will utilize AIDA64’s ability to average the temperature over time. Given twenty/thirty minutes at 100% load we arrive at a temperature that accurately represents our heatsink’s performance.

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.