Cooling: Thermaltake Aquarius II :: Setup

So, you look at all the equipment and you think to yourself, "That's a lot of stuff. It's going to take me hours to put it all together!" Not so, my friend. From first opening up the box, laying out all the hardware, reading the manual, to turning on the system for the first time with it all installed took 30 minutes. Now you may say, "But that was you. You know what you're doing." Yes, I do know what I'm doing, but I also look at every cooling solution with an eye toward those of you with more than one thumb on each hand, and I'm here to tell you that it is, in fact, very easy to set this unit up. Without going into a complete instruction of how to do it, I will simply cover the highlights. Before getting into that, I must tell you that Thermaltake recommends that you make sure your case has the right interior setup to house the Aquarius II. The main concern, as I see it, is that there is enough room for the radiator to fit where the front case fan would normally be. They suggest their Xaser cases of course, but any Chieftec/Antec server style case will have the necessary room. Now let's see how this all goes together.

First thing do to is to RTFM! For those of you not familiar with this term, it means Read The Frelling Manual! The manual is 30 pages of detailed instruction on what to do and when to do it. I found it to be very complete except for one minor issue, which I will discuss with you when I get to it. After you have read the manual and know what is expected of you, and have laid out all of the equipment, you will see that the most time consuming thing to do is to mount the water block onto the motherboard. And that's only if you have a P4 or K-8 mobo. K-7 and Socket 370 installation is a breeze. For the P4 and K-8, you will need to remove the mobo from the case, so that you can attach the water block using the included mounting brackets. For K-7 and Socket 370 mobos, you simply attach it with the clip provided. Once you have the block securely mounted to the mobo with the right amount of thermal paste applied, it should look like this:

The next step is to attach the 12v Water Pump to the inside of the case. This is done with the supplied magnets. I can hear some of you right now groaning about magnets being used inside the case. While they are more than strong enough to do the job they are designed for, they are not strong enough to cause any problems with your system. Just make sure to keep them away from the harddrive, and you'll be ok. Place the magnets as described in the manual; either by themselves if you have a steel case, or along with the metal bars and double sided tape provided if you have an aluminum case. Attach the pump power wire to an available 3-pin header on the mobo. (Do not use the CPU fan header. That's reserved for the radiator) Here is the recommended position of the water pump:

Before attaching the Radiator, you will have to remove the front case fan. The radiator fan will be the new front case fan, and trying to use them both will cause undue turbulence inside the case. Now using the magnets again, attach the radiator to the bottom of the case so that the radiator fan is as close as possible to the front fan air intake. Make sure that the water pipes of the radiator are facing out from the case. Plug the Radiator power wire to the CPU fan header so that the system and any software you use will be able to monitor the fan speed. The fan ran at 2700 RPM. 300 RPM faster than it was rated. It should look like this once set up:

The last of the main hardware is the Back-Up water receiver. It is positioned on the back of the case near the top as seen in the first picture below. Again, it will require magnets to hold it in place. In the second picture below, you will see where I have the receiver. I chose to place it here to get it away from the power supply hot air outlet. One thing to note is that the receiver can be removed once the unit is functioning properly. I decided to keep it attached because of the rather dry conditions of where I live, so that I can easily add more water if needed. Along with the receiver, you will need to attach the included PCI Back Plate. This has an open slot in it so that you can pass the hoses from inside the case to outside.

Now that the hardware is all in place, you will need to cut the water hose and springs in lengths so that they will go from connection to connection without being too tight. I did this by simply holding one end to where it was to be attached, and then bringing the hose to where the other end would go. I gave it a few inches of extra slack (you don't want a kinked up hose in there!), and cut it with a scissors. You then fit the same size (or as close as you can get to it) spring inside the hose (these are used to keep the tubing from collapsing and kinking), put a hose clamp on each end of the hose, and attach it to the appropriate connection. Please recheck the manual to make double sure you are putting the hoses in the right order to the right connection. One note about the hose clamps. These are quite strong, and you can rest assured that they are NOT going to come off even if someone gave them a good tug. Here's how the hoses will look once they are secured:

After you have all of the connections properly made, it's time to fill up the receiver with water and the included coolant mixture. Here is where I came across the only issue I had with the manual. It says to use a 10:1 ratio (10 parts water to 1 part coolant) and it says you may need from 250cc to 400cc of coolant depending on the length of the tubing. I think this could have been written out better, as I haven't got a syringe lying around to measure out the cc's. Also, what do they consider as one "part"? One ounce? Half an ounce? In the manual they show a Dixie sized cup 90% full of water, so I did the same thing and gave it a good squirt of the coolant. Carefully, start filling up the receiver in this fashion until the water level stops dropping in the receiver. The pump should now have water in it above the LOW level mark, which is located on the side of the pump.

You are now set and ready to try out your new water-cooled system. Well almost, before you get excited and start hitting the power button, please make sure that you go over every inch of tubing and all of the power connections to make sure they are as they should be. Once that is accomplished, go ahead and turn on the power. You will notice that the water will move quite quickly from the pump to the water block and back out down to the radiator and then back to the pump. Another thing you will notice is how quite this unit is. Right now the loudest thing in my system is the video card fan! One other thing to note is check out the cool blue LED inside the pump. Not only will this look great in a modded case, but it also allows you to check on the pumps water level very easily.

Keep the case side off and watch the unit to make sure that there are no leaks. If you spot any water, turn the system off IMMEDIATELY and recheck your connections.

Now that the unit is installed and running, let's take a look at how well it does what it's supposed to do.