Alphacool HF 38 Niagara Intel Core i7 CPU water block review - Introduction

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 06/08/2009 01:00 PM [ ] 0 comment(s)

Alphacool HF 38 Niagara Intel Socket 1366 CPU block review

Product:	Alphacool HF 38 Niagara Intel Core i7 CPU water block
Manufacturer:	Alphacool
Information:	website
Street price:	59 EUR

It is not exactly a secret that yours truly is a big fan of liquid cooling for the PC's processor. Literally every and any PC here in my office is liquid cooled. Even our beefy primary graphics card test system (project-x) has liquid cooling applied to its Core i7 processor. It's just such an effective cooling method, and when done right it's silent and very pleasing for the eyes as well.

It should not be a surprise that liquid cooling comes in many forms and shapes. There are many starter level kits out there that cool as well as a regular air-cooler. In the mid-range segment we see liquid cooling solutions often offered as kits with semi-professional reservoir, pump and radiator.

And then there's the high end segment. Definitely costly, sure. But it really is the best segment to be in when it comes to liquid cooling. Really high-performance, and the stuff that lasts a long time. In that segment, you nearly always make your own selection in radiator, tubing, fittings, pump, reservoir and fans, yet of course also choose the CPU, Chipset or GPU water-blocks yourself. Typically you purchase them separately.

Fact is, there aren't that many companies out there that offer liquid cooling products which you can purchase separately. There's a handful of them. One of them is the German based Alphacool. Recently they introduced a new CPU block called the Alphacool HF 38 Niagara. This new water-block is designed for Socket 1366 processors, aka Nehalem aka Core i7.

A little while ago we already reviewed their Alphacool NexXxoS XP water block (review here) and were impressed, but recently they launched this new high-end CPU block for 59,95 EUR... and we just had to check the new Niagara out...

Alphacool HF 38 Niagara Intel Socket 1366 CPU block review

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Alphacool HF 38 Niagara Intel Core i7 CPU water block review
There aren't that many companies out there that offer liquid cooling products which you can purchase separately. There's a handful of them. One of them is the German based Alphacool. Recently they introduced a new CPU block called the Alphacool HF 38 Niagara. This new water-block is designed for Socket 1366 processor, aka Nehalem aka Core i7. A high-end liquid cooling CPU block priced fairly. Let's check it out.

Alphacool NexXxoS XP Core i7 water block review
In this article we test the Alphacool NexXxoS XP HIGHFLOW Core i7 CPU water block. We will apply a nearly passive water-cooling kit to it and observe installation and temperatures. Since we could take a Core i7 965 processor up towards an overclock of 4 GHz we'd say this ia a very succesful product from the guys over at Alphacool.

AlphaCool External 240x128 Display
Today we are testing this cute External LCD-Display with the colossal 240x128 Pixel dimensions. Now that by itself is cool, but the software controlling the unit is where the magic happens. You can display pretty much any system info, yet it goes way beyond that. RivaTuner is supported, Fraps, Mainboard Monitor (MBM), SpeedFan and it does not stop there.

Alphacool Ready2Go Stacker (Passive)
Alphacool can deliver pre-fitted and modified PC Cases with water-cooling (prefilled and leak tested) installed. Today Guru of 3D will test the Coolermaster Stacker Silver with preinstalled water-cooling from their Ready2Go series of products. Pretty much install your components and you are good to go. The beauty of this beast is the fact that it is passive water-cooling, the only thing connected to the power circuit is an inaudible pump. That means this system just does not make any noise, at least not that we can hear.