Gadgetory

by an unlocked Intel fourth gen core i7 or Core i5 processor and get a free copy of Rome 2 total war click now to learn more alright so there's not much innovation left in the whole prefilled liquid coolers thing basically you're going to have to have a CPU block a pump a radiator tubing and coolant inside that's ok I guess you'll also need some fans on it to actually take the heat away but that didn't stop an Tek from trying here guys ok so this my friends is the cooler h2o 1250 a truly unique if nothing else all in one liquid cooling units so unlike many of the products on the market this is not a coolant or an ASA Tek rebrand this is an an Tek design that is very different from some of the other stuff that we've seen on the market that much will be apparent just looking at the thing so let's start with the features that really stand out so number one is that it uses a dual radiator so not all liquid coolers out there use a dual rad most of them still use single 120 or at the very most single 140 millimeter say standard thick radiator with a fairly high fin density so it is definitely going to perform optimally in a push-pull style configuration which is why ntek actually shipped the unit with not only the fans that are pre-installed but also a couple of extras although we will be testing in our standard configuration which is two fans not push-pull so there you go guys it also has integrated fans so integrated fans and shrouds these are in a push configuration by default and because of the bulk of the tubing and pumps on the one side of the fan here it does only go in one way so compatibility may be a little bit more of a challenge with this one and with other ones versus having one larger tank at one side and then a smaller tank at the other side it has two medium-sized tanks at each side to accommodate the extra tubing alright so the next thing I actually mentioned this briefly already is the dual pump design so it has two pumps built in one on each of the fan hubs here this again adds bulk but it also adds potentially performance but more importantly redone see if one of these pumps were to fail the other one would be able to keep operating the unit regardless this is one of the things that I dislike about all-in-one liquid cooling units and that is that they add more points of failure with a heatsink you got a fan on it there's one point of failure with an all-in-one liquid cooling unit you've got usually one fan and one pump which is two points of failure so two ways for the unit to die it also has what they're calling a sophisticated micro channel cold plate design on why they insist on calling in cold plates come on the entire water cooling community calls the water blocks why can't we just call them that anyway so the water block has a pre apply applied thermal compound on it and hooks into your system in pretty much the manner that we've come to expect from any of these prefilled liquid cooling units that does have built-in control so you've actually got oh my goodness look at all the wires okay here we go and they're all black so you should be able to hide them relatively easily so we have power so you can go ahead and plug that into your CPU fan header then we have USB so you're actually going to use an Tex grid software in order to configure things like the customizable RGB LED on the top as well as things like pump speed and fan speed you can monitor your coolant temperatures and all that good stuff and then finally also coming out of the unit here we have two wires that head into y splitters so we can power the two fans that are built into the unit and then two additional fans directly off of the pump right here so that's pretty much the summary I guess all that's left to it oh yeah it has a coolant inside that's water-based with black also pretty pretty typical stuff over the lips a proprietary blend or something like that so all that's really left now is how does the thing perform well I guess we'll find out is it worth the compatibility disadvantages and the customizability disadvantages of not being able to swap in your own fans in order to have that redundancy and potentially better performance I'll leave that to Luke to determine for you guys on our standard test bench I'm running a 3930k at 4.0 gigahertz with a voltage of 1.3 and that processor is crunching numbers in prime95 I also have an NVIDIA GTX 580 running combustor and overclocked a little bit just to add some more heat to the system for halation problems we didn't actually have any unless we wanted to put more fans on top of the radiator in which it would not have worked in our case configuration at all if you're looking to buy this product just make sure that your case and motherboard combination is going to be compatible with the configuration you're going to want this cooler in because you might have trouble with how your case has the radiator aligned and how your heat sinks on your motherboard stand out I was informed that I couldn't swap out the stock fans but I wanted to try anyways just because I love you guys and I got that off but I found that once the fan was off I couldn't actually put a new fan on realistically because the power for the pumps was ran through the fans so I didn't bother and we ran with the stock fans and we ran the stock fans at 1,100 rpm just like we normally do our Noctua fans there's a little bit of a variable here as all the other coolers are tested with Noctua nff 12s and these ones are not but it's as close as we could get it in a market awash with look-alikes the cooler 1250 didn't do quite as well as its competition that being other to buy 120 all in one liquid coolers but it's an interesting innovative cooler and I'm excited to see where they go with it if you like this style of cooler or if you don't like this style of cooler be sure to comment below and please express your most profound feelings with the like and dislike button and as always also 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