Today I have an unboxing of a product that holds a special place in my heart.
This is my personal favorite water cooling pump. This is the Swifttech MCP
655. So what makes it my favorite water cooling pump? Well, a couple of
different things. First of all, in my experience, both as a an enduser of this
product and as a reseller of this product, it is phenomenally reliable.
These pumps almost never die. They come with a one-year warranty, but I can tell
you with a fair amount of confidence, you pretty much won't need it. Number
two, the performance is awesome. This is one of the best performing pumps on the
market. Yes, you might be looking at, you know, this pump with sort of this
aftermarket adder that on paper outperforms it, but the reality of it is
once you have a good high performance pump that's pushing water through the
blocks, you're talking about maybe a half a degree tops a performance
difference between this and something else that that outperforms it in a
synthetic test. So, I really do love this particular product and I do use
one. In fact, my MCP655 is a few years
old and still going strong in my personal water cooled machine. So, what
does Swiftech have to say for themselves here? Ultra quiet. Okay, fair enough. I
buy that. No maintenance, compact design and adjustable speed, extreme
performance, reliability of 5 years meanantime between failure. Yeah, I buy
that for sure. Quick and easy installation, which is also true. And
yeah, that pretty much summarizes it, doesn't it? Here's a little diagram of
what the pump looks like on the inside, although you pretty much shouldn't need
to uh disassemble it for any for any reason. Okay, packing list. Oh, it uses
universal four pin Molex, which is great. So, you can plug it into your system no matter what. Pump speed is
adjustable from 4,800 RPM down to 1,800
RPM. Now, this is key. This is the most silent pump out there on the market that
I would consider reliable. There have been other silent pumps, but this one is
the one that won't fail you. And there's no nonsense. You're just turning down a
very reliable, very high performance pump to a lower speed. Here we go.
Operating voltage range, 12 volts. Yep, that's good. Plugs into a Molex. Here
are all of the technical specifications, which personally I'm not going to worry
too much about because what it comes
down to is it's silent, it performs great, and it looks a little something
like this. This is I I actually can't
stress enough the silence. There's two versions of this pump. There's the MCP
655 and the MCP 655B, which stands for
basic. Now, the basic version does not come with the adjustable uh
RPM. To me, that makes that pump not nearly as attractive an option because I
basically just take this, I turn it all the way down to one, and it is dead
silent. Now, I've tried I've tried testing this. My loop has a CPU block, a
GPU block, radiator reservoir, and this pump. And I go, okay, I'm going to turn
it all the way up to five. I'm going to turn it all the way down to one. How much of a temperature difference is
there? Nada. It's not measured by the
thermal probe on my CPU, which means it's probably somewhere in the 0.5 to 1°
range, like within that margin of error. It's much more silent and it's also a
very convenient feature because when you're first filling your loop in order
to get air bubbles out, it can be very useful to turn it all the way down to
the bottom, then crank it up to the top, then turn it all the way down to the
bottom. What that can do is it will alter the flow of the water through your
loop in order to dislodge air bubbles that might be trapped in your CPU block
or your uh radiator. So, that's going to mean that that annoying sound of of air
being sucked through the pump that makes like a
Yeah, that kind of noise can be eliminated much faster with a new build
if you have a pump that has variable speed like this one. Accessory wise, it
comes with a double-sided sticky mounting pad. Looks a little something
like that. You got some noise isolation, vibration isolation, dampening foam in
between and then two stickers on either side so you can stick it down. You can
also screw it down. That's what these holes here are for. Okay, so it comes
with screws as well as in a little instruction manual. Now, how does the pump work? Nice long Molex connector.
Recommend sleeving that if you're going to run it anywhere like far because it's
kind of ugly, but that's okay. Okay. Molex connector on the
end. And then you've got your inlet and your outlet. So, this is the inlet for
the pump that goes right into I hope you can see in there. I'm not sure if you'll
be able to see. Can you see? Okay. Well, it goes into the pump one way or another. And then it spins
inside and then pumps the water out the top. So, couple things when you're
installing a pump that are very important. Number one, you always want your pump to be lower cuz gravity works
than your reservoir. So, the reservoir water will feed into the pump without
any effort. You also want to make sure there's no restriction around the inlet
of the pump. So, if you have a really tight Ubend right before the inlet,
that's bad. If you wanted to limit the
flow rate of your pump by using tight curves in the tubing or whatever the
case may be, you should limit it at the outlet rather than at the inlet. The
inlet should be as restrictionf free as possible from the reservoir. Okay. And
that's pretty much it in terms of important. Oh, another one. Never let
your pump run dry. Ever. Never let it
run with no water coming into it. That's very, very bad. Never take a pump and
just, you know, oh, you know, I don't have my other water cooling components, but I want to find out if it works and
plug it in. Bad, bad, bad, bad. You will destroy your pump. Guaranteed. Okay.
Next. This pump includes half-inch fittings. So you can see these are/ inch
uh barbs and they are not removable. So
what that means is in my case when I want to use 3/8 in tubing I have to dip
it in boiling water and then stretch it over the fittings in order to make it
fit. Now there are aftermarket pumps for the D5. Although I see no particular
reason to use them because once you stretch a smaller tubing like a 7/16 or
a 3/8 in tubing over it, it will never
ever leak. I will personally guarantee that if you get it all the way over to
the end. So, thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the
MCP655. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings,
reviews, and other computer videos.