CoolIT Domino A.L.C. review - Introduction

CoolIT is a USA based company that started doing their cooling business a couple of years ago and instantly they became a hit. They introduced a very niche TEC (peltier) cooling product unto the market that made many of us scratched behind their ears. Niche often also mean high-end and thus expensive. With the product that they recently launched, that's just not case anymore.

A single self contained water-cooling based unit, that is very easy to install; it looks downright sexy and even performs quite adequately as well. It almost sounds too good to be true at 79 USD right ? CoolIT definitely achieved pulling this one off and recently placed this product into the market. You know what? It's gonna be a hit for sure. See we have seen and tested many single 120mm radiator/ventilator water-cooled products. And let's be honest here .. they where all *at best* very average and the cooling performance was sometimes even worse than standard active cooling. That fact alone is completely different with the CoolIT Domino A.L.C. And next to that it looks downright fantastic, it's configurable, is long lasting and affordable.

I'm a huge fan of water-cooling. There are very few systems here in the office that are not water-cooled. And there's a good reason behind it really. First off, water-cooling is extremely efficient it's a very quick way to get rid off and transport heat away from the processor. That by itself has several advantages, the biggest one being the overall the temperature of your processor will go down much faster than say a traditional air cooler. Another good reason for water-cooling is the noise level. When done right you can keep the volume of the fan on a  radiator really quiet creating a pretty inaudible experience. Last and most certainly not least is the most simple reason of them all .. it can look freakishly cool.

Anyhow, products like these are 100% Guru3D material. Over the next pages we'll dive into the Domino A.L.C, we'll show you the entire product with the help of a nice photo-shoot. And then obviously we'll take it by default pretty warm Intel Core 2 Quad QX 9770 Extreme processor, you know, the one with that 1600 MHz FSB. Not only will we look at it at it's default 3.2 GHz clock frequency, no in two stages;we'll overclock this processor towards 3.6 and 4.0 GHz. And during that time, we'll obviously stress the four CPU cores and monitor what temperatures they reach with the Domino A.L.C.

But seriously, can a 79 USD water-cooler be able to pull off an overclock towards 4.0 GHz ? Well, let's find out, next page please.