| Titan Bianca CPU Water Cooler - Page 4 of 3 |
Test System:
The Titan Bianca Water Cooler was benchmarked in two stages, with temperatures taken at idle and load. The water cooler was connected to the test system (specs listed below) and the temperatures were taken using MotherBoard Monitor 5. First, I monitored and recorded the Scythe Kamakaze heatsink, tested before at BigBruin. This stock-replacement will serve as a comparison tool to the Bianca Water Cooler kit. For load temperatures I used a combination of Folding@Home v5.03 and Counter Strike Source. The Scythe fan was benchmarked for a period of two hours after the completion of this time the temperatures were recorded. The same process and measurements were taken after the water cooling kit was attached. Please note, ambient room temperatures for all testing was held at a constant 25 degrees Celsius.
System Specifications:
• AMD Athlon XP2400+ @ 2.0GHz
• Asus A7N8X Deluxe motherboard
• 512MB Corsair TwinX PC3200 Memory
• Maxtor 160GB Hard disk
• 1x Optical Devices (CDRW)
• GeForce 4 Ti 4200 Graphics card
• Scythe Kamakaze Heat sink
Performance and Results:
Although the Bianca Water Cooler is easy to setup, it showed very slight advantages over traditional fan-cooling systems, if any. As stated at the beginning of this article, this water cooler will be most useful to the everyday user, not your overclocking enthusiast. Considering it is advertised with "Easy Installation" and "High Cooling Performance", one might jump at the opportunity to add it to his/her system. Titan has no doubt has aimed the product, and subsequent marketing of this product, at the novice.
For comparison purposes, we tested the Titan Bianca at high and low speed against a Scythe Kamakaze heatsink on the same test system. It is clearly evident that the Titan Bianca lacks even the most basic requirements for a water cooler. It is far behind even the Scythe Kamakaze air cooler, which provided temperatures comfortably below 40 degrees Celsius. Even with the room temperature at a low ambient temperature, the CPU temperatures remained at a high level with the Bianca. The 42 degree Celsius temperatures recorded at load on the Titan demonstrate the unit is simply too small for even non-overlocked processors. Other than the benefit of noise-reduction, this cooler just does not seem to have the cooling capacity for modern processors.
Conclusion:
The Titan Bianca Water Cooler is surely marketed for the everyday (think: non-enthusiast) user. A variety of issues prevent this water cooler from receiving raving reviews. Many of these issues appear to be quality related and need to be addressed before releasing this product as a large scale operation. The leaking of the reservoir and the problem attaching the hoses, although possibly isolated incidents, remain major faults. On top of that, the performance results show the Titan cannot even compete with aftermarket heatsinks at one third the cost of the Bianca, which is expected to retail for $129.99 when released to the US market.
The Titan Bianca Water Cooler held up under idle-operating conditions but when pushed to a load it simply could not keep up. The poor craftsmanship, higher than traditional air-cooled temperatures, and a lack of any provided warranty, lead to this water cooling kit to a 2.5/5 star rating.
Final Rating (2.5 out of 5 stars):  
Pros:
• Quieter than an aftermarket heat sink (even at the highest speed)
• Easy to install
Cons:
• Poor connectors
• Leaks & requires continually maintaining water level
• Poor finish on water block
• Poor/contradicting instructions
Special thanks to Titan for providing the Bianca CPU Water Cooler to BigBruin.com for review!
Please drop by the BigBruin.com forum and feel free to discuss this review.
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