Page 11 - Photos ESA Thermaltake water-cooling

Water-Cooling ESA style

We already told you that NVIDIA shipped along all kinds of ESA ready peripherals. Among them a chassis, a PSU and water-cooling. Above you can see the Thermaltake's ESA ready BigWater 780e. This is an easy installation cooling unit consisting of the pump and radiator built into one solution. It slides into the chassis and takes up a full three 5.25" drive bays. It's a complete package with CPU block, tubing, clamps even coolant. This version has the new ESA logic on-board which we connect to the internal USB port on the mainboard.

While not at all high-performance, the Bigwater 780 should offer relatively sufficient cooling for current Socket 775 and Socket AM2+ processors as well as the older Socket 478 and Socket 939/754. Its P500 pump is meant to be especially quiet but powerful. Thermaltake quotes a flow rate of 500 litres per hour. It's radiator however is not very big.

Once we unpack I can show you what this is really about though. The green PCB is the ESA control unit. We connected it to the USB bus and we could access the control unit and readout and alter it's functions. For example, we are allowed to alter flow-rate of the pump, fan RPM speed of the radiator yet also the water-level and temperature is being monitored.

Pretty advanced features for unfortunate mainstream cooler, as the actual cooling performance is not extremely special.