Gadgetory

hey everyone this is Steve from gamers Nexus dotnet and today we're looking at an taks a new cooler 1250 closed-loop liquid cooling solution which uses an umlaut so of course it is very good at being in a metal band I guess and it actually it uses a unique dual pump design with the palms mounted atop the fans so it is a bit different than what we're used to I ended up with two of these to test so I decided to take the whole thing apart and show you how it works as well as of course the normal benchmarking first the specs antics cooler 1250 is their newest high end 240 millimeter liquid cooler using an entirely in-house design and custom tooling by an Tek most CL CS that we commonly talked about if you are not aware use a stack for their their components and a stack is a supplier that basically builds the same product and puts new stickers on it there they're just they they make it and then Corsair NZXT whatever they put their sticker and their LED on it so occasionally some coolers to use other suppliers like cool it and there are a couple others but the point is that an in-house design is rare it's pretty much limited to Coolermaster Antec and maybe one or two offhand designs from other companies right now the 1250 uses two high rpm 120 millimeter fans bolted to the radiator and these are pre-installed so you won't be able to install your own fans but they are pretty high-powered stock atop each fan is a pump the pumps work in a push-pull configuration to move the coolant through the radiator and the cold plate so I say push pull of course it's just a pump right it just it just pumps it does both pushing and pulling but because there are two of them it is more efficient at pushing it to the CPU and then pulling it back up to the red from the bottom up and this is true for all liquid coolers from the bottom up we start with a copper cold plate that rests atop the CPU the cold plate uses a smooth copper finish for direct contact with the CPUs IHS and a thermal interface obviously goes between the two for any bumps that that need to be mitigated the cold plate is attached to the CPU block which is where our two hoses connect and liquid goes comes in from one hose and is pushed through the channels in the cold plate so the whole plate as you can see actually has little channels cut through the copper so it's pushed through those and then it's pulled out the next hose and and kind of push pulled back up to the radiator once the liquid ascends the exit tube and reaches the radiator the entire time this is happening the pumps are working in unison to do all of the movement and they connects because there are two pumps we see an accelerated rate at which the liquid moves which of course accelerates the rate at which it cools down and can be reused so the cycle is is a bit faster and more efficient in theory cooler liquid of course does mean a cooler cold plate which means a cooler CPU so the concept is very simple and in theory it sounds fantastic in practice you'll see the performance results in a moment what you're seeing right now though is a comparison of the antec cooler pump design against the standard ACE tech supplied one in this case a corsair h 110 you can see that the h 110 uses a plastic rotor to pump the liquid through the channels that ultimately cools the cold plate the pump itself is on top of the CPU in this instance so it is responsible for pushing the liquid to the radiator and then pulling it back down and this is fundamentally different from the 1250 s design and and we'll see which one performs better in benchmarks the H 110 is the current leader on our CPU cooler chart FYI now as great as all of this sounds antics design does have a few complications but they're not too bad I do want to go over them though for starters it's bulky if your case was advertised as being designed for a 240 millimeter radiator they might have designed that specifically for the standalone radiators which use user mounted fans the NZXT phantom cases for instance you wouldn't be able to mount the Antec 1250 in the top of those cases because the fans are too tall and there's not enough clearance so you'd have to install the cooler on the underside of this which of course means it will hang into the case more this could be a problem with some enclosures it wasn't with the 820 I was testing with similarly problematic the mounting system for the 1250 is one of the most annoying installations I've ever endured for a CPU cooler it's it's kind of clumsy and cumbersome for a few reasons an Tek checklist they say it super easy I mean you know great if you guys make it and you can install it fast right that's probably a good thing you should probably be able to do that I found it annoying so the biggest reason it was annoying is because the mounting bracket itself brushes right up against the chokes on some motherboard designs for the vrm in my case I'm using a GD 65 from MSI it's sitting on those chokes and installing it made me nervous enough to really you know double check myself constantly take a few tries to get the bracket tightened and there's barely enough clearance on either side where the RAM goes and where the vrm heat sinks go for the hoses and the cabling so it did fit just you know if you have one of those boards it will fit but it did take a good bit of courage to do so all that said the design itself is fairly innovative when it comes to the present CLC market and I'm excited to see where antec takes it let's get to benchmark so you can view our full testing methodology in the article in the link below on the bench antics cooler is a firm first place liquid cooler takes our best of bench award away from Corsair and is on this is on the extreme setting I'll talk about settings in a second you can see it's positioned just ahead of course there's a CH 110 which is our previous pack leader on the CPU cooler bench it seems that the dual pump design in this case actually does work quite well and the custom fans do impact cooling pretty substantially antic software controls the fan speed settings and the lighting the LEDs there are two different settings extreme and silent and then there's a custom setting that you can configure rpms vary from 600 to 3000 with 3000 and 650 being the extreme and silent settings respectively quite honestly the extreme setting sounds like a jet engine and is in my opinion too loud for normal human use it's great if you're doing extreme overclocking or rendering where you can kind of walk away from the machine or you don't care about noise but if you're gaming or if you're watching a movie you don't want that noise so it's not a setting you'd ever want while gaming but it's not made for that right it's made for extreme overclocking so if it's not the right setting for it I made the same exact statement about coarse hair and NZXT is extreme settings basically think of Extreme as the showcase it's the showcase car silent is is truly pretty dead silent and I here any annoying whirring or vibrational noise and that is the showcase of as quiet as it gets I found that using a custom setting at 1500 rpm works best it gives good cooling power and it still keeps it relatively silent about as quiet as your PSU fan will be anyway and antica if you're listening make a 1500 RPM mid-range option a default choice maybe even the stock choice it makes the most sense for end-users let them play around and custom with some other things but give them 1500 by default as for the LED stuff it's pretty basic big range of LEDs nothing important so you can set any color you want including black overall I'm very satisfied with the an tech cooler 1250 installation is a serious overhaul and if I see it again I'm gonna keep complaining about it until it's fixed but I can live with the hassle given the awesome performance and silence options just be aware that you're gonna curse and yell while here trying to figure out if it'll actually fit on your board with the chokes anyone who wants to stay away from an open-loop cooling but still has a large budget for liquid or wants silence this is our new front runner it handily beats out Corsairs H 110 at 120 bucks it's a pretty competitive price about the same price maybe a little more and a easy pickup all day long if you're looking for alternatives I'd say check out antics 950 for a smaller form factor version of this also NZXT is X 40 for a small version and Corsairs H 110 is still a damn good cooler if you can pick it up at 80 bucks it's probably worth saving the money just depends on your budget and your objectives silverstone has a brand new unit out and I'm in the process of reviewing that now check descriptions for links to all these products in the description below that will help you find something for your PC if you need more help post on our forums it's free support for you to ask a question and I hit the full review and benchmark below and I will see you all next time peace