Until a few years ago, watercooling had always been the black art of the overclocker. With a chip only dissipating 30w of heat, a home made system using nothing but a garden pump and an incredibly simple block of aluminium would keep the chip almost at ambient temperature. With this, people were achieving incredible speeds. As time moved on, chips got increasingly warmer and waterblock designs got increasingly more complex.

In this niche market it was easy to have a successful business model, as the people buying the products where enthusiastic geeks who knew the risks and what they were doing - this is why companies like Danger Den continue to survive.

With the enthusiast well catered for, the next stage in the evolution of watercooling is to introduce it to the OEM market. First, we have to ask ourselves, what does water cooling offer the general consumer that air doesn't?

Today's air coolers can cope with the heat of modern day processors, so watercooling doesn't tend to offer much of a performance increase. What it does offer, is good cooling, with low noise levels. This is because watercooling radiators use bigger, slower spinning fans, and take the heat straight out of the case, giving a much lower case temperature without requiring a large number of case fans.

Senfu were one of the first companies to release a commercial watercooling system. Compared to a home made system, it wasn't very good and scored well only with first timers.

Thermaltake tried, but failed, let down by their poor performance and unreliable pump.

Corsair have also tried with their hydrocool system, with much greater success, thanks to the simplicity of a solution that comes ready installed in its own box.

Making something like this for a general consumer is difficult. Everyone knows water and electricity don't mix, and they are reluctant to risk blowing up their expensive PC. They want a reliable watercooling system that takes little or no setting up, maintenance or risk.

Until recently, air cooling performed sufficiently well, at acceptable noise levels. But now, as processor wattages increase, and heatsinks grow, many people are finding computer noise to be a problem. Watercooling has always been just about the only way to have a quiet high performance computer, so is the watercooling kit an idea whose time has now come?

If the idea of a full watercooling set up for only £75 sounds intriguing, read on. If you are in a hurry and just want a few overview pictures and a summary/conclusion, we recommend reading pages 3, 8 and 9.

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