CeBIT 2003: Final Day In Hanover

It’ll Be A Hot Summer : Cooling Is A Must

The THG crew brings you further reports from eight days in Hanover. There are lots of new products, and we’ve had some interesting discussions with partners and manufacturers. In our last installment of CeBIT coverage, we’ll be focussing on cooling solutions for processors and graphics cards. And this market is really starting to boom : these days, your high performance chips simply cannot do without efficient cooling ! Conventional coolers are totally out ! First, we’ll show you products from Pentalpha, Titan, Spire and Coolermaster. To wrap things up, we’ll introduce you to the new graphics cards from ECS, Chaintech, Abit, Gainward, Innovision and Sapphire.

Pentalpha : Compact Watercooling

At a partner stand from Pentalpha, they were able to convince us how easy it was to install the Aqualia water cooling system, which we had talked about in our pre-CeBIT report . As we mentioned before, this is a compact watercooling system that can be installed by anyone, even the non-experts, in a few steps.

The complete unit consists of a 5.25" slide-in module, a CPU water block, a 1.5 meter long high pressure tube, a water bottle and a clip for Socket 7 and Pentium 4 processors. A P4 socket adapter for the water block is also included in the package, as well as thermal paste.

On the left side of the module is a water tank with an integrated water pump, on the right side is a cooling element/heat exchanger made of aluminum. Both of the 70-fans, not regulated, are reponsible for heat dissipation. Each fan rotates at about 3000 rpm, and, according to the manufacturer, the noise level is 32 db(A).

Starting mid-year, Pentalpha wants to offer fans that are quieter by about 3 db(A) and rotate at 2500 rpm. Currently, the engineers are also considering the use of temperature-controlled fans.

Quality by Pentalpha : the underside of the CPU water block has been smoothed to be absolutely flat.

The mounting screws and hoses seem to be of high quality. The system is delivered with a multilingual user guide that should be easy for the layman to understand. With this system, Pentalpha is targeting end users who are interested in a quiet and simple-to-install watercooling solution. As for the performance, the THG lab will bring you the test results in the near future.

According to the manufacturer, the price should be around US$ 149.