Cooler Master Aquagate Mini R80 Water Cooler

**Jason** · Last edited by Jason on Sun, 30 Apr 2006 14:02:51; edited 1 time in total

The Cooler Master Aquagate Mini R80 water cooler is a compact system designed to cool just a CPU. Everything comes pre-plumbed, with all the necessary components included (even cooling fluid). Simplicity is definitely a good thing, but this review will see how the performance weighs in as well. - The Review

Spire · Posted: Tue, 06 Dec 2005 00:45:51 Post Subject:

I was glad to see the 3.5 stars you gave this review.

Water cooling is either supposed to cool much better than air (and by a substantial amount too) or be silent.

I do not see an advantage to using water with this device.

This is probably the biggest reason I do not move to water. To get significantly lower temperatures requires much time, lots of money and some fancy parts.

And even then, you are still running a fan, (unless you use a giant bong like Asylum's Reserator) so the noise issue is present whether the fan is on a standard heatpipe sink, or a radiator...

I just don't get it.

**Jason** · Posted: Tue, 06 Dec 2005 13:11:30 Post Subject:

Yeah, the really strong points were the simplicity and the quality of the components. If it had come with the silent (Cooler Master) fan I tried on it later, it may have done better.

This thing 'could' really be good for an mATX PC, or some other HTPC type setup. It almost worked in mine, except the optical drive comes a little too close to the CPU socket in my current arrangement (I actually have to use a 2u server cooler it is so tight). With a passively cooled mobo chipset and video card, being able to water cool the CPU in there really appealed to me, since server coolers aren't even intended to be quiet (it has something like a 9 bladed 70mm fan + my own fan speed controller for sanity purposes).

Cooler Master Clue: Expectation