Asetek VapoChill LS review (sub-zero cooling)

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Copyright 2006 - Guru3D.com

I decided to mount the control unit at the bottom of the casing. There's a lot of space there and no cards can bother it. We connect the two heaters, the USB cable to the mainboard and the flatcable to the Lightspeed unit. All we have to do now is connect a Molex connector from the PSU to feed it a little power. Also the power button of your case goes to this PCB and a POWER_ON cable goes from this unit to your mainboard. That's right, this PCB control unit will decide whether to enable or cut power from the system. It's pure safety, if anything goes wrong the unit will shutdown your PC to prevent overheating.

How about getting power into the VapoChill LS ? Do not worry, it does not feed from your PSU. The cooling unit will draw its power straight from a power source. A two-way Power Connector is included with the unit and needs to be connected to the system's Power Supply. Once done, you then connect the normal Power Connector to the two-way connector.

You are now ready to power up the PC and the VapoChill LightSpeed. Scared yet ?
Well I'm not ! We are ready for a first try ... will the PC boot ?

Copyright 2006 - Guru3D.com

A quick test run. Yeah baby ! It's alive. The Vapochill system initializes, and the evaporator temperature starts to drop rapidly. At about -10ºC, the system checks the motherboard status, and once it hits that -10ºC the control unit will allow the computer to start up.

Copyright 2006 - Guru3D.com

Let's let me freshen up the cabling a little. Here we can see the unit activated. Look how nicely that control unit has been installed you can hardy see it huh ? It's under the blue cold cathode light.

With the LightSpeed power cable hooked up to the PSU, the cooling unit's LED display located at the front of the LS comes to life. During PC power off the display will show the information "VapoChill LightSpeed by Asetek Inc.".

Press the PC power button for 1 second and the LightSpeed's Compressor wakes up from its snooze.

Copyright 2006 - Guru3D.com

It's good to see that the PC system itself won't start up yet as the Compressor needs to cool down the Evaporator to a certain factory preset temperature which is -10°C as explained before. After passing that -10°C start up temperature, the PC will boot.

Screenshot001.gifOnce you have booted into windows please install the VapoChill Control Panel software.

Once the VapoChill Control Panel (ChillControl) Windows software is installed, you can select a variety of different views and create user-defined presets. The ChillControl utility you can download from the Asetek website is quite okay and very user-friendly. With this software you can find and define presets like the temperatures being read from the thermal probes and the voltage being applied to the heating elements are displayed, along with fan speeds and ChillControl status. A second tab holds the tools necessary to configure the LightSpeed, like power-up and warning temperatures, and sliders to throttle fan speeds and dial the power being supplied to the heating elements. There is also a "System Info" tab, which displays just that - system information on the LCD, but the fourth tab is home to some of the fun stuff.  On the "Appearance" tab, users can customize the information that is displayed on the LightSpeed's LCD. For example you can startup this display with "Hello Guru3D.com".

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