buy an unlocked Intel 4th gen core i7 or core i5 processor and get a free copy of
roam 2 total war click now to learn more all right so there's not much innovation
left in the whole pre-filled liquid coolers thing basically you're gonna
have to have a CPU block a pump a radiator tubing
and coolant inside that's okay i guess you'll also need some fans on it to
actually take the heat away but that didn't stop antec from trying here guys
okay so this my friends is the cooler h2o 1250 a truly unique if nothing else
all-in-one liquid cooling unit so unlike many of the products on the market this
is not a coolant or an acetech rebrand
this is an antec design that is very different from some of the other stuff
that we've seen on the market that much will be apparent just
looking at the thing so let's start with the features that really stand out so
number one is that it uses a dual radiator so not all liquid coolers out
there use a dual rad most of them still use single 120 or at the very most
single 140 millimeter it's a standard thick radiator with a fairly high fin
density so it is definitely going to perform optimally in a push-pull style
configuration which is why ntec actually shipped the unit with not only the fans
that are pre-installed but also a couple of extras although we will be testing in
our standard configuration which is two fans not push pull so there you go guys
it also has integrated fans so integrated fans and shrouds these are in
a push configuration by default and because of the bulk of the tubing and
pumps on the one side of the fan here it does only go in one way so compatibility
may be a little bit more of a challenge with this one than with other ones
versus having one larger tank at one side and then a smaller tank at the
other side it has two medium sized tanks at each side to accommodate the extra
tubing all right so the next thing i actually mentioned this briefly already
is the dual pump design so it has two
pumps built in one on each of the fan hubs here this again adds bulk but it
also adds potentially performance but more importantly redundancy if one of
these pumps were to fail the other one would be able to keep operating the unit
regardless this is one of the things that i dislike about all-in-one liquid
cooling units and that is that they add more points of failure with a heat sink
you got a fan on it there's one point of failure with an all-in-one liquid
cooling unit you've got usually one fan and one pump which is two points of
failure so two ways for the unit to die it also has what they're calling a
sophisticated micro channel cold plate designer and why they insist on calling
them cold plates come on the entire water cooling community calls them water
blocks why can't we just call them that anyway so the water block has a pre-applied thermal compound on it and
hooks into your system in pretty much the manner that we've come to expect
from any of these pre-filled liquid cooling units that does have a built-in
control so you've actually got oh my goodness look at all the wires okay here
we go and they're all black so you should be able to hide them relatively easily so we have power so you can go
ahead and plug that into your CPU fan header then we have usb so you're
actually going to use antex grid software in order to configure things
like the customizable RGB led on the top as well
as things like pump speed and fan speed you can monitor your coolant
temperatures and all that good stuff and then finally also coming out of the unit
here we have two wires that head into y-splitters so we can power the two fans
that are built into the unit and then two additional fans directly off of the
pump right here so that's pretty much
the summary i guess all that's left to it oh yeah it has a coolant inside
that's water based with glycol so pretty pretty typical stuff although it's a
proprietary blend or something like that so all that's really left now is how
does the thing perform well i guess we'll find out is it worth
the compatibility disadvantages and the customizability disadvantages of not
being able to swap in your own fans in order to have that redundancy and
potentially better performance i'll leave that to luke to determine for you
guys on our standard test bench i'm running a 3930k at 4.0 gigahertz with a
voltage of 1.3 and that processor is
crunching numbers in prime95 i also have an NVIDIA gtx 580 running combustor and
overclocked a little bit just to add some more heat to this system for
installation problems we didn't actually have any unless we wanted to put more
fans on top of the radiator in which it would not have worked in our case
configuration at all if you're looking to buy this product just make sure that
your case and motherboard combination is going to be compatible with the configuration you're going to want this
cooler in because you might have trouble with how your case has the radiator
aligned and how your heatsinks on your motherboard stand out i was informed
that i couldn't swap out the stock fans but i wanted to try anyways just because
i love you guys and i got that off but i found that once the fan was off i
couldn't actually put a new fan on realistically because the power for the
pumps was ran through the fans so i didn't bother and we ran with the stock
fans and we ran the stock fans at 100 RPM just like we normally do our knock
to a fan so there is a little bit of a variable here as all the other coolers
are tested with Noctua and ff12s and these ones are not but it's as close as
we could get it in a market awash with lookalikes the cooler 1250 didn't do
quite as well as its competition that being other 2x120 all-in-one liquid
coolers but it's an interesting innovative cooler and i'm excited to see
where they go with it if you like this style of cooler or if you don't like
this style of cooler be sure to comment below and please express your most
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