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Testing and benchmarking

Now that the system is hooked up and actually working as a cooling solution let's run some performance tests. Initial thoughts: very exciting. As always we set our room temperature towards 21-22 Degrees C for an objective comparison.

As you can see the Reserator 1 Plus is performing pretty well with regards to cooling our AMD64 Athlon FX-57 processor. We even have some overclocking potential to play around with.
Sound wise we do not even hear a small buzz from the pump. You literally need to place your ear on the reservoir to hear a teeny tiny buzz from it. I really must get me a DBa meter sometime.

Anyway, the CPU is running at a ~30 C temperature right after Windows booted up, but the reservoir will slowly get warmer and the final idle temperature is roughly 41 Degrees C give or take a 2 C Degree variation. The GPU of the graphics card will actually remain below 40 Degrees C, expect 37-38 Degrees C which is quite nice as an idle temperature.

Cooling method versus temperature in degrees C. The lower the better. This system is in idle and we slowly see the temperature build up.

As part of the test we maxed the workload of the CPU and GPU to 100%. How did we do that ? We simply looped a game benchmark for 20 minutes. That game is of course Half-Life 2. Have a look at the screenshot below:

We see similar behavior for the GPU. It maxed out at 51 Degrees C. With stock cooling it peaks at 75 Degrees C. This means that the water block can absorb masses of heat and the reservoir can cool down the fluid quickly enough to maintain very acceptable and most of all safe heat levels.

If we place things in perspective we see that the traditional "edge" of nearing 80 Degrees C for the GPU is completely gone. No more temps nearing 75+ Degrees C. No, it's slightly over 50 Degrees C. That's all. For the CPU there really isn't much difference over traditional air cooling, yet it's a really good temperature for the CPU.