Antec Kuhler H20 920 Liquid Cooling System Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
1,562 words · ~7 min read
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So today we're going to be doing a quick unboxing of the antec cooler H2O 920 so
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this is a thicker style radiator with push pull fans as well as a lowprofile
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CPU block SL pump unit so let's see what
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antech has to say for themselves they're saying it's next Generation maximum
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performance okay you have pwm control zero maintenance as as well as a quick
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Installation System it is compatible with 775 1155 1156 1366 am2 am3 am2 plus
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am3 plus so pretty much every socket Under the Sun these days here we go fan
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speed here's all of your general specs which are naturally covered by a sticker
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thanks for that let's go move that there
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sticker there we go all right so now we can see the specs
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so there's your fan speed from 700 to 2400 RPM radiator Di so the thickness of
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this rat is 49 mm that's the important one fans these are your standard 120x 25
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mil fans cold plate height tubing length
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Okay none of this is probably going to be that relevant that weight this is an interesting one so it's 1.6 lb and the
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great thing about these self-contained liquid cooling units is that if you ever
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have to ship or move your system around most of that weight is strapped to the
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case unlike a heat sink where all of the
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weight is going to be hanging off the CPU socket so there's a customizable RGB
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LED um on the uh CPU block itself so you
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can actually change the color of that that's pretty cool through the software
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uh pwm uh radiator fans okay included
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software provides essential tools to control and monitor the cooler H2O
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including coolant temperatures okay that's pretty neat and non-corrugated
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easy Bend tubes so that's something that we have not seen before on these
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pre-done liquid cooling setup so I will
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definitely be commenting on what kind of tubing they're using and what I think of
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it I've been water cooling for uh wow I guess it's been almost like 7
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years so I do have a fair bit of experience with tubing and
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blocks all right here's the insides
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actually one more thing on the outside of the box so lower CPU temperatures are
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better okay thanks for stating the obvious Mr graph uh CPU core attempt so
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here's the Intel air cooler here's a first generation liquid cooler so
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they're saying it's around 70° and they're saying the cooler H2O is more
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like a 60° and that's on an i7 980x at
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100% load so I'm not sure exactly which first generation cooler they're
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comparing to but uh presumably it's one of the slightly thinner ones uh such as
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NCH lclc uh here we have an installation
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guide although I should be able to figure out how this mounts relatively
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easily uh we have a chill control V
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version 1.0 no software thing so you can probably download that from the antech
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website we have mounting hardware so
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this is pretty straightforward we've seen this before hey this is neat so uh
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Corsair had a similar system with the H50 and the h70 but you can see now
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instead of it just the plastic bits just all being black they are colorcoded
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green for AMD blue for Intel so that is
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a nice touch and then we've got hold Downs for AMD as well as hold Downs for
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Intel and then all of the Little Hardware bits that we need all right
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let's take out the radiator CPU block and pump and then let's go ahead and
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take out the fans one of my biggest complaints about the uh the Corsair fans
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was that they just didn't seem very well built they're kind of flimsy um and
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they're pretty loud so these look a little bit better constructed I mean
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anc's been making fans for about 3 million years so I'm sure they've got
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fans figured out uh overall the frame feels quite good it's more like in line
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with the koolit fans that they were using on the uh on the Eco as well as
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the Vantage so here you go got another fan looks just like that lots of blades
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probably optimized for static pressure and the reason for that would be this so
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you can see it's quite a dense fin Arrangement here so that means that
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rather than optimizing the fan for CFM that is straight airflow in an
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unrestricted environment you want to optimize a fan for static pressure so
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that is in in a restricted environment how much air can it Force Through said
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restricted environment so here you can see how uh thick the radiator is and
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here why don't we do why don't we do the classic iPhone comparison oh I think I
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just showed crazy Russian oh well it's all good he's not really that much of a
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secret anyway you can find pictures of him on the ncx Facebook and I'm not that
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much of a crazy either okay okay all right you're not c um okay an Tech 920
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oh okay here's a hint as to who the OEM might for this it's right on there can
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you read that yeah yes no yes okay all right so
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here are the Easy Flex tubes or whatever it is they're calling them and actually
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These are nice look at that so these are using very thick thick walled tubing so
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this is still 1/4 in tubing but just uses an incredibly thick wall so that
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gives you this crazy Bend radius where you could basically take it and bend it
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like this and like that and all in a circle and it's still not going to
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collapse so this is uh outstanding actually that is definitely a benefit of
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using the cooler 920 so here is the pump and H sorry just
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got to pull that off there there we go here
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is the pump and block combo unit so that's where the uh custom RGB lighting
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is going to come from and uh there's the
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cooler branding these are rotatable so you can actually position it quite
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easily According to which way the tubing is coming in so that you don't have
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undue stress on the tubing or on the fittings all right here on the bottom
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you can see the copper base as well as the pre-applied thermal compound that is
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a highquality thermal compound so I wouldn't feel the need to replace it
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unless you are um taking it off and you
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need to reapply thermal compound to your CPU so you've got a bunch of cables
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coming off this guy all black thankfully that is uh that is excellent because the
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CPU socket can get very cluttered very if you have a bunch of brightly colored
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cables around it but we've got one USB so that's going to be for the monitoring
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software we have and that's a USB header
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so that'll plug directly into your motherboard and then we
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have H oh neat okay so the whole unit
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gets powered off of a single three pin so what you're able to do oh this is
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great so check this out okay guys so here's how this works your fans
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use their four pin pwm plugs to plug
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into this splitter right here okay the
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pwm control is all done at the
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controller level within the CPU block so what that means is that the ANC software
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does all of that control without any intervention from the motherboard and
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that really provides a way for ntec to control the end user experience much
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better because a lot of motherboards have control schemes that are
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drastically different from different from each other so this this way antech
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can accurately report the noise level of the system as well as the temperatures
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from one simple interface via USB so
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this guy provides power to the whole deal now I probably wouldn't recommend
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plugging this into your CPU fan header on your motherboard I'm not sure what
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ntech has to say about that in the instructions but three fans and the pump
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um seems to me like it might be a little much maybe I'm mistaken though maybe
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they're going to say that you should plug it into uh
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the CPU fan header yes they do okay they say the CPU fan header is uh perfectly
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capable of handling it remember USB is going to be providing power to some
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parts of some aspects of this as well so maybe they've got some kind of
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distribution system where it's not going to affect things negatively but there
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you go so thank you for checking out my unboxing of the antec cooler h920 don't
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